Monthly Archives: August 2016

ORO Annual Report

The end of the University year is the time to publish the Annual Report from the Institutional Repository.  The main headlines are:

  • Increase in all deposits and downloads on 2014-15
  • Steep increase in full text deposits (representing embargoed papers) on 2014-15 in line with the requirement to meet HEFCE Open Access Policy for next REF
  • ORO is a high performing institutional repository, ranked 8th of 142 UK repositories by the Ranking Web of Repositories

I’ve rendered 2 PDF versions of the report below the image – one using the old faculty structure and another with the new faculty structure.

ORO Annual Report 2015-16PDF Version of the Annual Report: ORO Annual Report 2015-16

PDF Version of the Annual Report (New Faculty version): ORO Annual Report 2015-16_New Faculty

 

 

Repository Downloads and Site Visits

In July 2016 44,215 items were downloaded from ORO this compares to 48,009 in June and 62,084 in May.  Downloads (and site visits) decline over the summer months and match the academic year with greater activity during term time and quieter over holiday periods.

The downloads pattern (below) is spiky and based on a dataset from Feb 2013 onwards but it does show a dip over the summer months and at Christmas.

ORO Downloads

The site visits pattern (below) has a larger data set from Jan 2011 onwards and shows the seasonal variations more consistently.

OROSITEVISITS

Well, that’s all well and good but it’s not so insightful is it.  Maybe not, but there are a couple of other observations we can make when we look at the data in this way.

(1) How come there are more downloads per month than site visits?  Surely you need to visit the site before you can download something? Well most of the downloads come straight from Google or Google Scholar where you can download the full text directly from the search results page.  So these downloads aren’t counted as site visits in themselves (by Google Analytics).

(2) Site visits peaked in 2012/13, dropped in 2014 and have steadily consolidated since then.  I was alarmed with the drop in 2014 – some colleagues at other Institutional Repositories thought this was the effect of REF 2014 with high usage leading up to submission in 2013 and then a drop off of usage after submission in 2014. Maybe that’s the case, maybe also it’s the effect of (1) with the repository effectively becoming invisible to users accessing content via Google and Google Scholar.

(3) Why are the download stats so spiky? Well the above counts (IRUS) are the best we have to go on and they are COUNTER compliant.  Nevertheless, they don’t represent individual clicks from humans accessing known research content – some downloads are from automated harvesters.  These robotic downloads are frequently detected and filtered out of download counts by IRUS but others may not be detected and may be counted until they are detected and filtered out.  Moreover, there are genuine research reasons for mass harvesting of repository content for text mining as a research corpus.

ORO July Downloads

The Top 50 Downloads for July are below.  It’s the first month we’ve recorded this against the new faculty structure – we can see Faculty affiliations and where (currently) available School affiliations.  We’ll have to work this out a bit in ORO – we have the problem of representing researchers who have now left the OU and were never represented in the current structure.  We also need to think about how to represent IET and the Learning and Teaching Innovation Portfolio.  But we’ll get there – and we do have the potential to report at greater granularity at School level (e.g. FBL) so I’m hoping we can do some refined quarterly ORO updates.

The Top 50 in itself shows a smaller number of downloads than last month and I’ll expand on that in an upcoming post.  But overall with 44,215 downloads in July (as recorded by the IRUS service) ORO continues to be a very well used repository (14th of 110 repositories) using the IRUS service.

ORO July 206 Downloads

Using ORO for Learning and Teaching

The focus for ORO remains the dissemination of OU research outputs to the widest possible audience.  However, there is a use for ORO that we sometimes forget: ORO can be an Open Access resource bank for module production.

When she was at the OU as Director, Research, Scholarship and Quality Astrid Wissenberg gave a presentation on using research outputs in modules.  At the time I was aware of around a dozen ORO items that were being used in OU Modules and gave Astrid some examples for the presentation she titled Sprinkling gold dust: challenging students with cutting edge research.

I’m aware from colleagues that ORO items are quite heavily used in some IET modules, so I thought I’d have another look to see if there had been an increase in the use of ORO items in OU Modules.  Below is a list of known library links to ORO records provided for module production – we found 18 different items associated with 23 different modules:

oro items in modules

So there is continued usage of ORO items in module production… and maybe there is a lot more off my radar – I’d love to know about it!

I’ve also noticed at least two ORO items being used in FutureLearn MOOCs: Regine Hampel (2014). Making meaning online: computer-mediated communication for language learning. was used in Understanding Language and Rosie Flewitt, David Messer, and Natalia Kucirkova (2015). New directions for early literacy in a digital age: the iPad. was used in Childhood in the Digital Age.  There seems an obvious match between Open Access research and Open Access teaching (see blog post Open Access research in Open Access courses).

The benefits of using Open Access materials from ORO for teaching include:

  • Linking to ORO items is free
  • OU researchers involved in module production are in a great position to identify relevant work for use in modules
  • OU researchers can deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript of their work in ORO at any time – even if it has already been published.  Adding the item to ORO makes it available for using in module production.

Of course ORO isn’t the only place to go, if you are looking for Open Access content CORE is the best place to start with over 36 million Open Access articles aggregated from repositories across the world.

And it works both ways, one of the most downloaded items in ORO is Nigel Cross (2001). Designerly ways of knowing: design discipline versus design science. Design Issues, 17(3) pp. 49–55 – it gets several hundred downloads a month!  One of the reasons for this is because it is used in a Masters programme in Interaction Design and Technologies at the University of Gothenburg.  So getting the full text in ORO may increase the dissemination of a research output via University Curricula across the globe.