Exhibition: OU Research at 50

ORO (Open Research Online)

In 2006, The Open University launched the Open Research Online (or ORO) database, a repository for OU researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed and published research output. ORO is publicly-available, and almost 50% of the current content has a full-text version available to read and download. The most frequent types of content are journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, but there are plenty of other formats included as well.

ORO also features over 2,500 Open University theses freely available in full text – including the very first PhD thesis produced by an Open University research student (in 1973), “The Afro-American and the Second World War” by Neil Wynn.

Since its launch, ORO has grown in both size and reputation. The statistics for the repository are freely available, and by 2019 it has seen over 9 million downloads of the content, which stands at around 42,000 separate items (and counting!)

The statistics interface allows you to browse information about the repository, including which authors and which items have been accessed the most. This 2004 article about teaching by Bob Jeffrey and Anna Craft is the most downloaded entry on the site, with over 60,000 downloads since ORO was launched.

The first clip on this page is from an episode of The Open University Library’s podcast “Completely Shelfless” in which Chris Biggs, the Research Support Librarian responsible for maintaining ORO, discusses some of the more recent research content.

The Library’s Research Support Team also launched a companion repository in 2016: Open Research Data Online (or ORDO). This collection is specifically for the public storage of research data, as opposed to the final published output. The second clip on this page shows an example of one such piece of research data, namely a video showing raw footage of the tracking and detection of table tennis balls in flight. (Please Note: This video has no sound.)