Monthly Archives: June 2017

ORDO on tour… on your desktop again!

ORDO online drop-in: Monday 3rd July 14:00-14:30

ORDO screenshot

As part of our ORDO on Tour series of events, we have arranged another online drop-in session at 14:00 on Monday 3rd July for any research staff or students who would like to find out more about the system.

ORDO is the OU’s data repository, provided by Figshare. In this session, Megan from Figshare and Dan from the OU will demo the system, including how to upload items, using project spaces for collaborating work, and curating data into collections or branded groups. There will be time for questions at the end, so feel free to bring examples of your own data and explore the opportunities around storing and/or sharing your research outputs!

If you would like to attend, but this time doesn’t work for you, please let us know as we may consider running future online drop-ins should this prove popular.

Instructions for joining
There is no need to sign up ahead of time; at 14:00 on 3rd July simply:

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Mobile Library Research Support

Over the coming weeks we have decided to leave our desks and set up a mobile one-stop-shop for 1:1 support on:

  • Research Data Management
  • Open Access Publishing
  • ORCIDs
  • Open Research Online (ORO)
  • Open Research Data Online (ORDO)
  • Bibliometrics
  • Researcher Profiles/Visibility (e.g. academia.edu and ResearchGate)

Tomorrow (Thursday 8th June) from 10-12, Chris Biggs and I will be based on the hot desks on the Ground Floor of the Stuart Hall Building. Please drop by with your questions, big or small, or simply to sample one of our biscuits and say hello!

Tomorrow is just the beginning though, here is our schedule for the following weeks:

Date/time Location
Thursday 8th June 10-12 Stuart Hall hot desks – ground floor
Monday 12th June 10-12 Michael Young Building – TBC
Tuesday 20th June 10-12 Robert Hooke Building -TBC
Tuesday 4th July 10-12 Jennie Lee Building – Oak
Wednesday 12th July 10-12 FASS – TBC
Thursday 20th July 10-12 Gass – Z101

 

Repository Downloads – Open Access, Community and Social Media

This is the second post concerning ORO downloads in March and April 2017. The first looked at general characteristics of repository downloads, this one focuses on a single research output in ORO.

Mair Lloyd’s PhD thesis Living Latin: Exploring a Communicative Approach to Latin Teaching Through a Sociocultural Perspective on Language Learning appeared in the the Top 50 downloads from ORO in April with an impressive 173 downloads in April.  It also had interesting referral traffic – 172 referrals from Facebook and 69 from reddit – much more than I would expect… so this was worth digging into a bit.

The thesis was made live in ORO on 10th April and on the same day Mair published a blogpost… thanks for the mention.

A couple of days later Mair tweeted and pointed to the same blogpost – this got a lot of retweets and likes on twitter.

And then on the 18th May The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies retweeted Mair’s tweet and also posted it to facebook

RT Mair @MairLloyd My #PhD thesis on Living #Latin now available for download: #Classics

Posted by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies on Tuesday, 18 April 2017

 

On the 19th a new thread on reddit was created:

There was some discussion of the thesis on reddit and that is reflected in the number of referrals coming to ORO from the site.

On May 1st Mair’s thesis was picked up in the Latin around the Web weekly round up and in a facebook post:

Links to a few interesting Latin-related things we've come across the last week (+ an interesting quote).

Posted by Latinitium on Monday, 1 May 2017

 

Finally, and coming into May the thesis was picked up by the French language Langue & Cultures de l’Antique on its website…

and again on twitter:

Phew!!!  So lets map that against the downloads of the thesis and the visits to the ORO page:

We can see the impact the various posts on social media and the web impact on the downloads and page views of the thesis. And (selected) referrals in April and May total:

  • facebook 246
  • reddit 72
  • Latinitium (Latin around the web) 54
  • twitter 10
  • Langues & Cultures de l’Antique 7

But before I get too carried away with myself, Mair can provide some valuable insight:

This is a […] piece of research that was much awaited among practitioners of Living Latin, and […] many of that community are facebook friends and twitter followers of mine. It isn’t just social media per se but also strong relationships, forged through promotion at conferences and attendance at Summer schools that has driven up the interest in my work. Those relationships certainly add to the power that social media has to give wider publicity to research.

So, what might we conclude…

  1. Getting theses online and open access via a repository increases the dissemination of the research and the potential impact (please note – small i).
  2. Fostering relationships and community off and online can demonstrably increase the reach of the work.
  3. Once the research is out there, Open Access, it’s readership swells on the web and via social media beyond the initial interventions of the author.

I feel I want to draw a triangle… hang on, I live in Milton Keynes…

 

Repository Downloads – March & April 2017 Edition

This edition of the downloads report from ORO forms 2 posts.  In the first I look at the general characteristics of repository downloads and repository web sessions.  In the second I will focus on a single item in ORO and how creating strong relationships on and off line aid the dissemination of a research output. 

ORO downloads and web sessions have some defining characteristics:

  • Both downloads and web sessions fluctuate across the academic year.  There are dips in downloads and web traffic in the summer and peaks in the spring and winter (either side of Christmas).

  • Downloads and site visits are remarkably stable.  There are no steep troughs or peaks outside the annual variations.  A cumulative average mapped onto the chart indicates how steady downloads and web visits have been over the last few years.

  • Downloads are higher in number than site visits.  At first that seems counter intuitive – don’t you need to access the repository to download the paper?  But many downloads of content archived in ORO come direct from Google and Google scholar – so these counts are not collected in site visits as recorded by Google Analytics.

Monthly top download counts also show a remarkable stability with 37 of the Top 50 in March also in the Top 50 in April.  This stability is somewhat reassuring – the counts aren’t fluctuating wildly without rhyme nor reason – the full lists are below.  However, those items that do break into a top downloads list often have a story behind them… (see next post!)