Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Chris looks after Open Research Online (ORO) on a day to day basis. He has worked in this role since 2011 and can advise on using ORO to maximise dissemination of research outputs and Open Access publishing generally.

Training Offer: ORCID

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We currently have 343 ORCIDs recorded in ORO and 11,261 papers in ORO have at least one ORCID recorded against a co-author.

We are running a workshop on Thursday 12th October at 10AM where you can learn about ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers), the non-proprietary identifier for researchers that has become the de-facto standard in the community.

Publishers and funders are increasingly requiring researchers to have ORCIDs. The session will explore why they are a good idea and the time saving benefits for researchers. Please bring along a mobile device as there will be time in the session to sign up for an ORCID, add research and scholarship outputs to your ORCID record and configure it to auto-populate with new publications.

Full details are available on the My Learning Centre or email library-research-support@open.ac.uk.

Update:  The Presentation Slides and Notes are now available.

August ORO downloads – where is Open University research used?

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This is the third and final post looking at the top downloads from ORO over the summer months.  Each post has used the lens of download counts to look at a different benefit ORO offers the University – this post looks at the various places OU research is used.

Creating reports on downloads of Open University research papers deposited in ORO gives me the opportunity to see where OU research papers are being linked from and referenced, aside from being cited in the scholarly literature.  So looking purely at the top 50 downloads from August, and that’s a relatively arbitrary starting point, where do you find OU research?

Wikipedia

At least 4 research papers in the August top 50 downloads are referenced in Wikipedia:

Doherty, Neil F. and Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona (2010). Internet retailing: the past, the present and the future. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 38(11/12) pp. 943–965.

7th in the top 50 is referenced in the page on Retail Leakage

Karakas, Fahri (2010). Spirituality and performance in organizations: a literature review. Journal of Business Ethics, 94(1) pp. 89–106.

14th in the top 50 is referenced in the page on Meditation

Boulstridge, Emma and Carrigan, Marylyn (2000). Do consumers really care about corporate responsibility? Highlighting the attitude-behaviour gap. Journal of Communication Management, 4(4) pp. 355–368.

25th in the top 50 is referenced in the page on Value-action gap

Herring, Horace and Roy, Robin (2007). Technological innovation, energy efficient design and the rebound effect. Technovation, 27(4) pp. 194–203.

28th in the top 50 is referenced in the page on the Rebound effect in conservation.

These references go back to the published version of the paper rather than the open access version in ORO.

Open University Teaching

I’ve blogged before how repository Open Access content make good bedfellows for online teaching (especially Open education).  In the August list we see one paper Wiles, Fran (2013). ‘Not easily put into a box’: constructing professional identity. Social Work Education, 32(7) pp. 854–86  (joint 21st in the top 50 downloads) is being linked to from the OU module K315 Critical Social Work Practice:

Non OU Teaching

In the August list we also see several papers that are being referenced in non-OU teaching materials, both in the UK and globally.  Unfortunately I can’t get beyond the institutional authentication to see how they are referenced, but the papers are showing referrals from each of the institutional domains.

Faulkner, Dorothy and Coates, Elizabeth A. (2013). Early childhood policy and practice in England: twenty years of change.International Journal of Early Years Education, 21(2/3) pp. 244–263.

is 19th in the top 50 downloads and is being used by Bolton University in an online module.

Winters, Ben (2010). The non-diegetic fallacy: film, music, and narrative space. Music & Letters, 91(2) pp. 224–244.

is joint 21st in the top 50 downloads and is being used by Southampton Solent in an online unit on Film Music.

Keeley, Vaughan; Crooks, Sue; Locke, Jane; Veigas, Debbie; Riches, Katie and Hilliam, Rachel (2010). A quality of life measure for limb lymphoedema (LYMQOL). Journal of Lymphoedema, 5(1) pp. 26–37.

is 42nd in the top 50 downloads and is being used in an online course by The University of Victoria in Canada.

Roy, Robin (1993). Case studies of creativity in innovative product development. Design Studies, 14(4) pp. 423–443.

is 15th in the top 50 downloads and is referenced in the University of British Columbia Engineering Physics Project Lab.

Policy Documents

4 papers in the August top 50 most downloaded appear in policy documents.

Dorst, Kees and Cross, Nigel (2001). Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution. Design Studies, 22(5) pp. 425–437.

is 18th in the top 50 and is referenced in: Research, development and innovation: the case of social housing in Mt Druitt, NSW.

Slade, Sharon and Prinsloo, Paul (2013). Learning analytics: ethical issues and dilemmas. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(10) pp. 1509–1528.

is 23rd in the top 50 and is referenced in: Visions for Australian tertiary education, Learning and teaching technology options – EU Law and Publications and Research evidence on the use of learning analytics – EU Law and Publications.

Ferguson, Rebecca (2012). Learning analytics: drivers, developments and challenges. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 4(5/6) pp. 304–317.

is 8th in the top 50 and is also referenced in Research evidence on the use of learning analytics – EU Law and Publications.

Cross, Nigel (2001). Designerly ways of knowing: design discipline versus design science. Design Issues, 17(3) pp. 49–55.

is 5th in the top 50 and is referenced in Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2011 Symposium.

Social Media

I often write how Open Access research is picked up in the social media.  In the August top 50 we also see evidence of papers referenced in the social media:

Sharples, Mike (2013). Mobile learning: research, practice and challenges. Distance Education in China, 3(5) pp. 5–11. 

is 31st in the top 50 and is referenced in Eric Stoller’s blogpost on How Mobile Technologies are Changing Higher Education

Kirkwood, Adrian and Price, Linda (2014). Technology-enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: what is ‘enhanced’ and how do we know? A critical literature review. Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1) pp. 6–36.

is 10th in the top 50 and has had 33 tweets from 30 users in Twitter and is also subject to this post on reddit

Collective action

Buckingham, David; Willett, Rebekah; Bragg, Sara and Russell, Rachel (2010). Sexualised goods aimed at children: a report to the Scottish Parliament Equal Opportunities Committee. Scottish Parliament Equal Opportunities Committee, Edinburgh, UK.

is joint 31st in the top 50 downloads and is listed in the resources for Collective Shout “a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls.”

…and finally

Lim, Sungwoo and Anand, Mahesh (2015). In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) derived extra-terrestrial construction processes using sintering-based additive manufacturing techniques – focusing on a lunar surface environment. In: European Lunar Symposium (ELS) 2015, 13-14 May 2015, Frascati, Italy.

is 13th in the top 50 and is referenced in the Monero Moon Prize, where a “prize of 10,000 Monero (XMR) will be awarded to the first team or individual who operates a 3D printer on the Moon” – apparently that’s around USD $1.3 Million!

Full August list:

ORO Usage Data

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Ever wondered what your most downloaded paper in ORO is? Ever wondered how many papers your School has in ORO? Ever wondered how many Open Access papers are in ORO?

ORO has the functionality to help you answer these questions.  You can look at the usage data by person, individual paper, school, faculty and university.

The data are available from the ORO Statistics page.  We’ve created a guide to help you get usage data out of ORO.

You can collect data about downloads of particular papers and if you want to dig a bit deeper you can see where those downloads are coming from and how people are finding your papers by looking at referrals to ORO records.

The guide includes a health warning – a download count should not be assumed to be a person downloading the paper, or indeed a person reading it!

PDF: ORO Usage Data Guide

July ORO downloads – how do people get to ORO?

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This is second of three posts looking at the benefits and functions of the institutional repository through the lens of the top monthly downloads.  This post looks at the different ways people get to the Open Access papers in ORO.

In June and July the top 50 downloads in ORO had another new entry:

Burel, Grégoire; Saif, Hassan; Fernandez, Miriam and Alani, Harith (2017). On Semantics and Deep Learning for Event Detection in Crisis Situations. In: Workshop on Semantic Deep Learning (SemDeep), at ESWC 2017, 29 May 2017, Portoroz, Slovenia.

In which the authors “introduce Dual-CNN, a semantically-enhanced deep learning model to target the problem of event detection in crisis situations from social media data.”

The paper was added to ORO on the 14th June and was 13th on the top downloads list in June with 211 downloads, and 24th with 146 downloads in July.

Referrals from social media seems to have had significant impact on the downloads this paper received, most notably from Twitter.  On June 25th the Accel.AI (Artificial Intelligence network) twitter account tweeted a direct link to the paper:

This was retweeted by Massimiliano Versace

and then he retweeted himself retweeting @AccelerateAI

The following day it was tweeted by Vineet Vashishta (a “Top 10 influencer on #MachineLearning & #DataScience) – this amassed the most retweets and likes.

The tweets (and their retweets) seem to have had a direct impact on the downloads of the paper, especially the latter, which appears to have resulted in over 100 downloads of the paper.

This seems to tie in with a previous analysis of ORO downloads and the beneficial impact of the patronage of a Twitter Heavyweight.  The lead author Grégoire Burel, Research Associate in KMi in STEM added:

“It seems to be a ‘completely out of the blue’ case. We have a follow up paper (‘Semantic Wide and Deep Learning for Detecting Crisis-Information Categories on Social Media’) that will be presented soon at ISWC17 (21-25 October) so it would be interesting to see if it gets picked up again after we publish it to ORO”

I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it!

Search and Referrals

Whilst the majority of traffic coming to ORO is from a direct search in Google there is an increasing trend for referrals in ORO, both from social media and other referring websites like Google Scholar.  In 2014 15% of traffic came from referrals, this year (to date) it’s up to 25%.

This shift in traffic from direct search to referrals is interesting.  A Forbes article back in May, The Trend To Facebook Referrals Is A Risk To Google Search, called it context search:

“People often want answers to their questions within the context of their community. So “searches” are changing. People are going back to what they did before Google existed – they are asking for information from their friends. But online. And primarily using Facebook.”

I find that quite compelling and so far this year:

  • Referrals from social media have a lower bounce rate (71%) than search (78%)
  • Referrals from social media have a higher average session duration (1:45 minutes) than search (1 minute).
  • Referrals from social media have more pages per session (2.13) than search (1.61).

However, results from general referrals (e.g. from clicking a link on a website) compare as well or better than referrals from social media:

  • 66% bounce rate
  • 1:45 minutes a session
  • 2.16 pages per session

So maybe it’s not so much about someone you (kind of) know on social media giving you a tip, as actually knowing you’ve found what you were looking for.

Top downloads list for July:

June ORO downloads – The Pennyland Project

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This is the first in three posts reviewing top downloads from ORO over the summer months.  For each month the counts offer an opportunity to reflect on a particular function or benefit the repository provides. 

June downloads have an interesting entry at number 30 with 114 downloads.

Chapman, J.; Lowe, R. and Everett, R. (1985). The Pennyland Project. Energy Research Group, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.

It’s the report on “the performance of 177 low-energy houses at Pennyland, Milton Keynes, monitored by the Open University Energy Research Group (ERG), for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC)”.

Pennyland houses, early 1980s by Bob Everett (Public Domain)

The report is over 30 years old and is referenced in Wikipedia, as is a sister report: Everett, R.; Horton, A. and Doggart, J. (1985). Linford Low Energy Houses. Energy Research Group, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.

Downloads to both of these reports are generally consistent at around 20-30 a month – showing a steady level of usage.  I initially thought the downloads spike in June had been caused by the celebrations around the 50th birthday of Milton Keynes.  However, it seems the ORO record had been referenced by a page on the BBC Future website published on the 14th June.

The article details how infrared imaging can reduce carbon footprints and looks in particular at the story of Brian Harper who worked with The Pennyland Project.

Which is all lovely, but what’s my point?  Well, how much other stuff is there out there that we should be preserving and making available in ORO?  Not just for the sake of it, or just because we can, but so it can still be used and referenced in both scholarly communications and general public discourse.  Is there a danger that in focusing on the latest Open Access Policy, we lose sight of a key function of institutional repositories: preserving and providing access to research materials created by the University that sit outside standard journal and book publishing channels.

Full June downloads:

June Downloads

ORO ORCID connector

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We have completed the first stage of our ORO – ORCID connector.  It is now possible to link your ORO profile to your new (or existing ORCID account).  This link has three key benefits:

  • It allows all your publications listed in ORO to be automatically added to ORCID
  • It verifies that your ORCID account is actually yours (ORO serves as an institutional verifier of your identity)
  • Your ORCID id will feed through to the HESA information in your personal details on staff self service [OU staff only]

But there are a couple of things to be aware of:

  • This connection will only identify duplicate publications if they have Digital Object Identifiers
  • New records added to ORO are not automatically added to ORCID at this stage

Both of these functions will be addressed when we pick up the ORO – ORCID development work with the release of a Jisc funded plug-in for ePrints (the Open Source software ORO operates).  We are hoping the plug-in will address other outstanding functionality (e.g. pulling items from ORCID to ORO and displaying ORCIDs in the front end of ORO).

In the meantime if you’d like to take advantage of our current integration please follow the steps below:

  • Go to http://oro.open.ac.uk/cgi/users/home?screen=Items and click the button labelled “Create or Connect your ORCID ID”.
  • On the bottom of the next page, click the “Connect to ORCID” button.
  • If you need to create an ORCID account:
    • On the next page complete the form with email address and a new password, accept the conditions, complete the captcha and click the “Authorize” button at the bottom
  • If you already have an ORCID account:
    • On the next page login to your ORCID account using your existing ORCID username and password and click the “Authorize” button at the bottom.

 

 

 

Repository Downloads – Open Access, Community and Social Media

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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

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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!)

HEFCE Open Access Policy: one year on – how is it working?

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It’s been one year since the HEFCE Open Access Policy for the next REF came into force. In a nutshell the policy requires all journal articles and published conference items (with an ISSN) to be deposited in a repository within 3 months of publication (probably acceptance from April 2018) with the Author’s Accepted Manuscript.  So how is it working?

What is working?

How compliant are we? That’s normally the first question… and there are 2 answers. Firstly, of the eligible outputs added to ORO we reckon that compliance is around 84% – this includes items published Gold Open Access.  It doesn’t include outputs that may be compliant in another institutional repository or a subject repository.  However, we estimate only around 60% of OU affiliated research outputs get added to ORO so there is a significant number of outputs that still aren’t going into ORO.  And, if they aren’t reaching ORO we aren’t in a position to see if they are meeting the HEFCE policy.

Are we getting more Open Access items?  From April to March 2016-17 we received 737 Author Accepted Manuscripts that’s compared to 595 deposited in the previous year. Given that deposits of journal articles and conference proceedings are slightly down year on year (1767 in 2016-17 compared to 1873 in 2015-16) that’s some healthy growth in accession of Green Open Access content.

How can we do better? Is often the follow up question.  Firstly, getting better coverage in ORO is one answer and we need to be exploring automated ways of populating ORO to know what the institution is publishing.  Once we have the data we can then go about trying to get the full text, or identifying compliance elsewhere.  Secondly, we need to continue to get the message across about the policy, some researchers remain unclear about the requirements. We need to be creative on both counts.

What’s not working?

Well, there are a few problems for me.  To be fair, some of them are the challenges of Green Open Access, not the policy itself.

“I can’t get the AAM” – We have engaged researchers trying to do Open Access the Green route who are struggling to meet the policy.  Researchers collaborating overseas who aren’t the corresponding author have real issues obtaining the Author Accepted Manuscript from the corresponding author.  We have to remember that the corresponding author may have no knowledge of the UK context and may find the self-archiving process totally alien. Obtaining the full text at all, let alone within 3 months of publication, is a challenge.

“It’s not enough time” – The proposed move to deposit from 3 months from acceptance rather than publication poses a massive challenge for us.  We have been transparent to our researchers and asked for deposit 3 months from publication, not 3 months from acceptance.  And our compliance levels indicate that we are being successful.  However, we should remember the policy is requiring a significant change in behaviour for some researchers not used to the complexities of Green Open Access.  Moving the time frame to 3 months from acceptance would mean our compliance rates would drop.

“Is it really not eligible?” – What about those items that haven’t met the policy requirements… are they seriously not eligible for the REF?  Is HEFCE expecting 100% compliance.  I doubt it, but I don’t know.  What I’m expecting are some kind compliance levels to be announced not dissimilar to the RCUK compliance levels introduced when their Open Access Policy was introduced (e.g. in Year 1 45% should be Open Access, in Year 2 53%, Year 3 60%, Year 4 67% and Year 5 75%).  But understandably HEFCE won’t announce that because it might impact on the levels currently being attained – we might take our foot off the pedal.

One danger of this is that we start second guessing the audit HEFCE might undertake. In a light touch audit the home institution may be the only people who know whether something met the 3 month deposit criteria.  So what interest does that institution have to disallow that output from its own REF return?

“It’s not Open Access is it!” –  When we do manage to get Author Accepted Manuscripts and deposit them to the repository, then we look up the embargo periods to see how long we have to lock them down for and we have embargo periods of 18 to 24 months… that’s not Open Access is it? Sometimes, it’s hard not to conclude that it’s more a Repository Deposit Policy than an Open Access Policy.

So, in conclusion, we are getting an increase in Open Access papers available at the OU, which is great, but it’s not without headaches, and a lot of hard work from everyone involved!

Prior publication and repository deposit

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We’ve had a couple of instances recently where unpublished conference items deposited in ORO were subsequently submitted to a journal (both Springer journals) only to be rejected due to “textual overlap” with the item in ORO.  This “textual overlap” was detected by automatic plagiarism software (like ithenticate) which contains an index of both published works and web pages.  Authors should be aware that submitted papers will quite likely be checked by anti-plagiarism software – and clearly content from institutional repositories (at least ORO!) is indexed by them.

The publisher’s rationale is that making the full text freely available in ORO constitutes prior publication and therefore the submission was rejected.  However this is not consistent.  One of our OU authors stated “We get mixed signals from journals as there are some who don’t have a problem with the article being on ORO”. And in this instance once the item was taken down from ORO the paper was successfully re-submitted.

We don’t want anyone’s publication career to be jeopardized by depositing papers in ORO so we’ve added an FAQ to our help pages – if you are considering submitting something to a journal don’t put the full text of it in ORO until the publication venue has been secured.

However, it’s worth exploring this in a little more depth.  First, let’s get a couple of definitions – both from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) website.

  • Self-plagiarism’/text recycling (submitted article) – Reusing one’s own previous writing without being transparent about this or appropriately referencing/quoting from the original.
  • Prior publication – Where a journal considers posting of data or a preprint before submission as ‘publication’, and which will therefore exclude those items from subsequent submission to the journal. Grey and rapidly changing area, varies greatly from journal to journal.

So in our case it seems the journal considers that deposit in ORO constitutes prior publication and that this is a “(g)rey and rapidly changing area, varies greatly from journal to journal”.

So is deposit in ORO publication?  Well yes in a way,  we are making something publicly available. However, there are key publishing functions institutional repositories do not undertake: we don’t do editorial selection, we don’t manage peer review, we don’t copy edit or type set, we don’t print, we don’t do marketing… we barely do any of the 96 things publishers do!

Moreover, the whole concept and existence of preprints (where papers are made public to “quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community“)  seems to run counter to this interpretation of “prior publication”.  In many disciplines ‘publishing’ a preprint on a preprint server (or subject repository) and final publication in a journals is the modus operandi.  So, I’d question whether deposit in an institutional repository really does constitute prior publication.

However, reluctantly, I’ve put up our FAQ

Other useful reading:

Possible self-plagiarism and/or prior publication, The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).  This case was similar to our one but indicates initial posting was done on an individual website not an institutional repository.

Plagiarism detection by Publishers, Imperial College Library