Open Research Online

This month, I’ve decided to switch things back to a Top 10 rather than a Top 15, for no other reason than there were far too many downloads to report on should I have stuck with the latter. From memory, 14th place was tied between about 12 articles, and 15th even more!

On a related note, we do intend (this year) to implement within-item download stats. So, in the not too distant future, for any full-text article in ORO, you will be able to see how many times it has been downloaded in the current month, and in total. I’ll still compile a monthly Top 10, as I think it’s nice to highlight the most-downloaded, but for anyone who doesn’t appear in the list and is curious about downloads for their work, this will offer a solution.

Anyway, here’s the full list for September: ORO downloads 09_2010.

Every year, to help raise awareness of the benefits of Open Access in scholarship and research, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) organise Open Access Week. A global event, and now in its 4th year, Open Access Week is due to take place this month, starting Monday the 18th of October.

To mark the occasion, Library Services and Research School are running a competition for the best ORO success stories. Has depositing your work in ORO helped raise your research profile, or perhaps that of your research group? Do you have evidence that it has helped you gain extra citations? By opening up access to your research through ORO has it helped generate impact beyond academia?

Send in your stories (one or two paragraphs is fine) to lib-oro-team@open.ac.uk. I will summarise the best entries in a post on this blog, and a £20 Amazon voucher will be awarded to the overall winner. The deadline for entries is the end of Open Access Week: Sunday the 24th of October. Good luck!