Are institutional research repositories relatively less important for the sciences?
Prompted by a couple of recent threads of email correspondence, I thought I’d raise the slightly thorny issue of why there doesn’t appear to be many of our science publications appearing in the most-downloaded stats from ORO. In the words of one of the people who contacted me about this, “[either] science at the OU is no good, or people in science use other means of communication etc.”.
I’m not the best placed to comment on the quality of our scientific research here at the OU, although I would hazard a guess that it cannot all be labelled bad, nor for that matter can it all be labelled good, much the same as at any other institution one would assume. So, I doubt very much that science at the OU being “no good” is the reason behind its lack of presence in the ORO download stats.
Instead, my own hunch is that, across Science as a whole, academics have been (and still are, to a certain extent) spoilt by their access to electronic journals, databases, and other subscription-based resources. They are very much used to visiting places like Science Direct, Web of Science, Scopus etc., and then clicking through seamlessly because their libraries have paid access to the journals which interest them. Other disciplines, in the Social Sciences and Arts, have perhaps (relative to the sciences) been lavished to a far lesser degree in terms of access to electronic resources, and so have evolved more innovative ways to search for literature.
One might reasonably ask, therefore, do institutional research repositories serve as much of a purpose for Science as they do for other disciplines? Well, I think it would be foolish to make any kind of judgement here based on anecdotal evidence from ORO alone. It would, though, be interesting to hear from other institutions as to the trends in their own download stats. How high do the sciences feature elsewhere?
What is clear, however, is that even if scientific research is relatively less well accessed in institutional repositories now, it is extremely unlikely to remain the case. All the signs are that the aforementioned seamless access to electronic resources will decline over the coming years, simply because libraries cannot keep pace with the volume and cost of journals. In the wake of this, scientists will also need to become more innovative in the way they search for literature, as well as disseminate their own work for the benefits of their peers facing the same access problems.
My prediction then, is give it time. Science will have its day!
April 29th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Subject respositories may well be an issue in this. For the biomedical sciences, deposit in PubMedCentral (and now PubMedCentralUK?) is well established. For physicists, arXiv is the place to go. If people are already using these, they may be reluctant to deposit again in the institutional repository. Just a thought.
April 29th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jamestoon, Colin Smith. Colin Smith said: New blog post: Are institutional research repositories relatively less important for the sciences? http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ORO/?p=123 [...]
April 30th, 2010 at 9:27 am
When I looked up Warwick’s all-time top 20 articles recently, I found that most were from our Education department, the Medical School and Psychology. I looked at keywords which brought people to those articles and it might be that at least some of their popularity could be because of their topics being interesting to the general public. I wonder whether the hard sciences are just not such popular topics?
That said, of course there was considerable educational/academic interest in the papers too, from the network providers’ information I could find… and I’ve long since noted that the pattern of visitors to our repository matches University terms and the working week. So repositories are certainly not only accessed by the general public! However, since most visitors arrive via Google it is possible that current affairs and trendy University courses (which psychology is but the likes of physics and chemistry aren’t!) might influence which are our most popular papers.
April 30th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
I thinkperhaps you are over-interpreting the data. Presumably (?) most of the accesses were driven from Google. If so, what kind of search terms were used? Is it the case that you’d need very specific search terms to pick up the science, while more general terms will pick up the more popular papers? Or is it the case that the OU is comparatively better-known in the context of education than in the context of science?
April 30th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
I see what you are saying Les, but you could argue that science-related research in repositories is much easier to find on Google for that very reason, i.e. obscure terms = less results to wade through. This is assuming that scientists are looking for other scientists’ work using Google, i.e. they know what terms to plug in. On a related point, other stats we collect imply the majority of visitors to ORO are academics, postgrads and undergrads (compred to Joe Public).
May 2nd, 2010 at 9:01 am
We don’t have any pure sciences studies at my institution, but we do have a strong health sciences dept. However, of our 5 most popular papers, 3 are from the business school. I find this quite interesting, because most of the business academics I’ve worked with here do like to start their information seraches on Google, and it does make me wonder if this is a preferred route in business, rather than using databases.
May 10th, 2010 at 11:02 am
We have three science articles in our top 20 most popular downloads list, and one holds top position. http://epubs.glyndwr.ac.uk/topdownloads.html
Glyndwr University Research Online. Science articles have always been on our list, but are now being replaced by social work subjects, as this part of the repository grows. I think the science articles appeal to a more specific audience, who have historically accessed research through the relevant journals they subscribe to, rather than cold searching. Maybe as repositories grow in science content, researchers will become more accustomed to searching online. I also wonder if the general public don’t search for science articles, but if they do find them they will be interested. Maybe we need to raise the profile of science, after all without it the world would be a very different place.
May 24th, 2010 at 8:41 am
[...] was also an interesting ORO blog posting about the seeming lack of downloads of Science items and that this might be due to high access [...]
November 12th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
All the signs are that the aforementioned seamless access to electronic resources will decline over the coming years, simply because libraries cannot keep pace with the volume and cost of journals.