Open Research Online

As most people will know, up until now, I have regularly produced two monthly top 10 lists for ORO: the most-viewed journal articles and the most-viewed non-journal articles. However, I’ve always preferred the idea of providing figures on full-text downloads rather than visits, as I think this has the potential to provide people with much more meaningful information.

A visit to a particular article may well be someone genuinely interested in reading and using that bit of research, but, equally, it could be someone who has just performed a Google search, clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at it for a second, and then moved on because they realised it was not what they were after. A download, however, probably means a lot more than that. If that same someone has clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at the title and abstract, and then taken the decision to download the full text, I would say there is a fair chance they have made the decision that that document is going to be useful to them in some way. And if that someone is an academic carrying out a literature search for their next paper, it may even translate into citations for you!

Anyway, I’m not going to go into the reasons why I haven’t reported on downloads up until now, simply because they are boring technical things that no one will be interested in. However, suffice it to say we have now gotten over these boring technical problems and have been merrily recording full text downloads since the 15th of December 2009. So, without further ado, here is the first top 15 (no longer top 10!) downloads for January 2010: ORO downloads 01_2010a.

An oft-quoted statistic is that 63%  of journals endorse immediate open access (OA) by allowing the Accepted Manuscrips of peer-reviewed papers to be deposited in institutional repositories. This of course leaves 37% for which an embargo is required, ranging from a few months to, well, infinity. To help with access to this embargoed material, many repositories make use of an “eprint request” button, allowing visitors to contact the main author from that institution and ask to be sent a copy by email. Essentially, this cuts out the time the user would otherwise need to invest in browsing the institution’s website, looking for the email address of the author, and generating a request themselves. It also makes use of the fact that, in most copyright assignment agreements, authors are allowed to distribute personal copies, for non-commercial reasons, to their peers and colleagues. There are some that argue the technicalities of this, but I won’t go into that here.

Instead, my reason for posting on this topic is to raise the possibility that, far from being a useful partner to OA, could the eprint request button, in fact, end up being an unforseen hindrance? What! (I hear you all shout). How can something that provides more efficient access to otherwise closed-access research be a problem? Well, the devil is in the detail… quite literally…

You see, with the eprint request button comes information. At the very least, that information will be a name, an email address (and thus an indication of the requestor’s institution), and a reason for wanting a copy of the paper in question. All of a sudden, rather than just being told his or her paper has been downloaded 50 times in the last month, the academic is finding out who wants to read their work and why. This is really valuable stuff, especially as we (in the UK at least) move increasingly towards having to justify the impact of our research. Which is going to go down better when it comes to the REF… that this or that paper, or this or that research theme, seems to have attracted a lot of traffic in our repository; or that we know for a fact that our research in such and such a field was requested by someone from local government to help develop a new policy. You see where I’m going with this…

Basically, I wonder whether there might come a point where academics prefer the closed-access/eprint-request option because it ends up telling them what they want to know, and, perhaps more importantly, what their institution needs to collect for research assessment purposes. I’m not saying this is something that will definitely happen, nor perhaps should I be planting the idea in the minds of OU academics who read this blog (!)… but, I do think it is an important issue to raise for discussion. So, feel free, go ahead and comment!