Edinburgh Research Archive access stats: Q1 2016

Posted on May 4, 2016 by theo

Image: Bass valve trumpet. Nominal pitch: 8-ft C (CC-BY from the MIMEd collection)

Not one to blow our own trumpets too often, I’m pleased to report that during the first three months of this year we have achieved 334,913 page views and an incredible 207,945 downloads from the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA).

ERA contains documents written by, or affiliated with, academic authors, or units, based at Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers. Holdings include full-text digital doctoral theses, masters dissertations, project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials.

Top 10 downloads from the Edinburgh Research Archive during Q1 2016

The most widely accessed items in ERA are an eclectic bunch of materials; mostly PhD theses, but also including an out-of-print civil defence manual from 1949, and a Psychological Screening Test produced by researchers at the University of Edinburgh.

It is pleasing to see that ERA is providing a platform for wide dissemination of materials that would otherwise not easily be available for consultation. We can’t second guess what people will find useful so by putting all our doctoral research online – in a structured format that is indexed by all major search engines – we can maximise the reach of these carefully written words in the hope that it will fall into the hands of someone who would be grateful to read them.

Some thoughts on the impact of Sci-Hub

Posted on February 25, 2016 by theo

Sci-Hub has been getting a lot of attention recently – for those of you not up to date there are some really good pieces written here:

What should we think about Sci-Hub?

Next moves in the Sci-Hub game

Signal not solution

The last article raised some interesting points that prompted a reply from the Sci-Hub founder, who I think mistook critical thinking for criticism. If you would indulge me I’d like to spend 5 minutes thinking about the impact of Sci-Hub and what the longer term implications for scholarly communications are. I’m not particularly saying anything new, just crystallising a few thoughts that have been floating around.

What is the short term impact of Sci-Hub?

The impact is massive for anyone stuck outside of a subscription paywall. Immediate free access to articles that you would have had to pay ~$30 each. For these people it is a game changer. I don’t need to eulogise how important this is for enabling access.

For publishers, at a first glance it looks terrible. Their pirated content is being distributed for free. Shock! Horror! Quick unleash the legal dogs of war!

But take a closer look and the disruption enabled by Sci-Hub is not quite like the disruption that has occurred in other digital media (think Napster etc). This is because the customers who pay for content are mainly institutions and not individual customers, and they have very different behaviours. I would estimate that the long term financial impact of pirated material for academic journal publishers would be negligible at best, and at worst just a small dent in their 30%-40% profit margins.

Longer term effects.

If you step away from the warm rosy glow of immediate access, you’ll find that the change in scholarly communication is not as drastic as you first thought. On the whole, institutions will not drop all of their journal subscriptions because a website is offering free downloads of articles. Organisations, who in this case have the purse strings, do not think and behave like individuals.

Any reputable institution would not be able to tell their researchers that they have cancelled subs to the journals they read and that they have to find and use pirated content instead. Like them or not, we can trust publishers to make their content available 24/7 (well, most of the time) because we have service level agreements and other legally binding contracts. What is the longevity of Sci-Hub? I don’t know, but the Sci-Hub founder freely admits that the site runs on donations and it costs several thousand dollars per month to keep running. Unlike other scholarly communication nodes – for example arXiv* – there is no funding mechanism that organisations can use to pay Sci-Hub to keep running because it’s activities are illegal and that status is not going to change any time soon. As such, institutions cannot rely on Sci-Hub to provide access to it’s services 24/7 and will always stick with the publishers.

Sci-hub is a sticking plaster

It is worth repeating that the bottom line is that organisations will most definitely not stop paying subscriptions to journal publishers because of Sci-Hub. More knowledgeable people than me have pointed out that Sci-Hub is a symptom of the problem, or that it is palliative care which alleviates the immediate problem. Unfortunately, I don’t think Sci-Hub will be the main catalyst for wider change in scholarly communication that people want, or need, it to be. Subscriptions will still be paid, researchers will still publish in those pay-walled journals, we will still have restrictive licences, text-mining will still be difficult. Plus ça change. The problem is that authors and readers need better than this.

[*Other scholarly communication nodes have sustainable business models – for example arXiv raises ~$350,000 per year through membership fees generated by approximately 186 institutions.]

Copyright waffle and the illusion of choice.

Posted on February 9, 2016 by theo

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stuart_spivack/3934968493/

ice cream cone trio by stu_spivack : http://edin.ac/1Rm0wEi

An academic colleague of mine recently had an article accepted for publication in a journal. As usual they were emailed by the publisher who asked them to sign an Author Publishing Agreement which would transfer copyright to them. However, the author noticed that the publisher also allowed authors to retain their own copyright by instead signing a Licence to Publish.

Keep your copyright!

The researcher wasn’t sure whether to assign copyright to the publisher, or if it would be preferable for them to retain copyright. On the face of it, it seems like a no-brainer – keep your copyright rather than signing it away. This is the mantra that open access advocates have been saying for years.

BUT more importantly.

Always read the small print – or get someone else to do it for you – and understand what you are getting yourself into.

The illusion of choice

In this particular case, if you read both the standard Publishing Agreement (to transfer copyright) and the Licence Agreement (to keep copyright) with a fine-tooth comb you will find that they pretty much contain the same language verbatim. There is no practical difference between them both in the end results. Both the author and the publisher will end up with exactly the same rights for exactly the same duration. There is the illusion of choice but it literally doesn’t matter which piece of paper is signed. This is an example of Copyright Waffle and it sidetracks from the important things.

Waffles by Brenda Wiley: http://edin.ac/1Rm13Gq

Important things:

By hook, or by crook, make your work open access.
If you don’t know how, then ask someone who does; generally speaking Librarians will always be able to help you.
If you have the option, publish your work with a Creative Commons licence; CC-BY is our favourite flavour.

OAI9

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Fiona Wright

Last week I attended the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9) in Geneva, a workshop looking at developments in scholarly communication, it was a diverse programme and attracted people from all sectors of scholarly communication, here are some of my highlights from each day;

Day One – Beginning the first day were a choice of tutorials, I elected the institution as publisher: getting started presented by UCL who are the first fully Open Access University Press in the UK. This offers a real alternative to commercial publishers, at the moment the majority of UCL Press authors are internal, external authors are liable to pay an APC.

The Keynote by Michael Nielsen, Beyond Open Access, looked at how open access policies should be crafted so they don’t inhibit innovation by constraining experimentation, new media forms and different types of publication. Following this was the session Looking at Barriers and Impact, Erin McKiernan, who is an early career researcher talked about her own experience and barriers she has faced in accessing research, she has made a pledge to be open, her opinion was early career researchers are in a position to be game changers in terms of making their research open. Finally Joseph McArthur, talked about the Open Access button helping readers find open access versions of research outputs, this is a tool created by young people who frequently faced barriers to accessing research.

Day Two – The second day of the workshop was held at the Campus Biotech

The first session looked at Open Science Workflows, CHORUS and SHARE, Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer from Utrecht gave a really interesting presentation on the changing workflow of research – they had three goals for science and scholarship – Open, Efficient, Good. We should be supporting open science instead of just open access leading to diminishing traditional journals. This was highlighted using a diagram they created – 101 innovations in scholarly communication, highlighting the patterns and processes of innovation in this field. This is an ongoing survey of scholarly communication tool usage – part of an ongoing effort to chart the changing landscape of scholarly communication.

Following this session was Quality Assurance, focusing on researchers and reforming the peer review process. Janne-Tuomas Seppanen from Peerage of Science stated that some peer reviews are excellent – some are not, Peerage of Science tries to address this by the scoring of peer reviews, the idea being that peer reviewers are themselves peer reviewed increasing and quantifying the quality of peer review. This service is free for academics and publishers pay. Andrew Preston from Publons is looking at speeding up science by making peer review faster, more efficient, and more effective. The incentive for reviewers? Making peer review a measurable research output.

I also attended the break out session on Copyright in Data and Text Mining which gave an overview of the legal framework and an introduction to The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age launched in May this year which ‘aims to foster agreement about how to best enable access to facts, data and ideas for knowledge discovery in the Digital Age. By removing barriers to accessing and analysing the wealth of data produced by society, we can find answers to great challenges such as climate change, depleting natural resources and globalisation.’

The second day of the workshop ended in style at the Ariana, the Swiss museum of glass and ceramics which opened its doors especially for attendees of OAI9.

Day Three – The focus of the first session was the Institution as Publisher, a new theme for OAI. Catriona Maccallum from PLOS focused on the need for transparency, publishing is a cycle, not just about content provision. The services an institution can offer include; Open Access, Open Access Presses, transparency, assessment, rewards and incentives, she went on to say the institution should be driving changes. Rupert Gatti, Open Book Publisher talked about bringing publishing to a research centre level, open access allows direct dissemination to a different audience and would allow authors to disseminate not just books and articles but other types of scholarly output.The Final speaker in this session, Victoria Tsoukala from National Documentation Centre, National Hellenic Research Foundation talked specifically about open access publishing in the Humanities and gave an overview of University led publishing within her institution looking at the various challenges (funding, outputs being perceived as poorer quality) and the opportunities (ability to regain control, innovation, transparency and fairness and assuming new roles for libraries).

If you’re interested in finding out more, all the presentations are available online by clicking through the programme.

Oldest thesis record in the British Library’s e-thesis online service (EThOS)

Posted on May 15, 2015 by theo

Over the last few weeks and months we’ve been adding a lot of digitised material from our historical collections to the Edinburgh Research Archive. One of the collections that has been scanned is a series of M.D theses written in Latin and published in the period from late 1700s to early 1800s. We now can claim to have the oldest thesis record in the British Library’s e-thesis online service (EThOS) – a dissertation written by Thomas Charles Hope and published in 1787. The challenge is on for other institutions to beat this.

Thomas Charles Hope was one of the University of Edinburgh’s more interesting alumnus who discovered the chemical element Strontium, and also taught a young Charles Darwin who viewed his chemistry lectures as highlights in his otherwise largely dull education at Edinburgh University (we’ve come along way since!).

Thomas Charles Hope’s M.D thesis can be accessed online for free in the Edinburgh Research Archive.

Edinburgh Research Archive : a new look

Posted on March 13, 2015 by theo

We are pleased to announce a new look and feel to the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). Over the past few weeks our Library Digital Development team have been busy upgrading ERA to a newer version of DSpace.

The main differences you might notice are:

a responsive user interface design
an improved discovery search/browse option which allows new filtering options
several improvements to help Google Scholar better index the content
lots of under the bonnet improvements and bug fixes

Full screen v smartphone view

The responsive user interface design helps to make ERA look good on screens of all sizes from widescreen monitors to smartphones. Instead of squeezing everything from the large screen onto smaller screen size displays some information is dropped. Can you spot all the differences?

The text is dropped from the dark blue banner, the breadcrumb links in the light blue bar under the banner are condensed, the left hand side navigation panel is collapsed by default but can be toggled by the list icon, and the item abstract is re-positioned underneath the download and main metadata display.

For those that are interested ERA is now running DSpace version 4.2 (with some local mods including security updates), whilst running the Mirage 2 theme.

Open Access in the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine

Posted on June 26, 2014 by dtate

My name is Anna Krzak, and I am an Open Access Research Publications Administrator for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. I have been in this role since March this year. Previously, I worked as an Open Access Publications Assistant (also for MVM) so I am not entirely new to the University and its Open Access (OA) project. I have been assisting academics within the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine with the RCUK OA policy implementation since April last year but, since I used to work mostly from home, I should introduce myself properly now.

The main purpose of my new role is to gather Open Access full text versions of research papers and the accepted peer-reviewed manuscripts and to upload the files to the Institutional Repository. As part of that, I ensure that the licensing terms and conditions are adhered to, including any embargo periods, and that any licenses or set phrases are acknowledged in PURE. In addition, I often advise academic staff on research funders’ Open Access policies and relevant Open Access options. If necessary, I consult the publishers in regard to their often unclear self-archiving policies (this is probably my least favourite bit..). As such, my role combines both theoretical and practical aspects of the OA implementation project that’s currently being undertaken throughout the University.

As the RCUK OA policy has been in force since April 2013, I thought it would be a good idea to evaluate the progress of its implementation in my College:

Please note that the collected evidence refers only to peer-reviewed research articles (including review articles) and conference proceedings that were submitted for publication after 1 April 2013 and that acknowledge the RCUK funding (as per the RCUK OA policy).

RCUK Compliance for the reporting period 1/04/13 – 4/06/14:

Approximately 224 research outputs have been identified, of which 192 have open access documents available to the general public. This means an 85% open access compliance rate (as of 4^th June 2014).

All outputs	All Open Access	Gold/Gratis OA	Green OA
223	191	164	27

However, a more detailed analysis of the RCUK requirements for OA has revealed few secondary problems:

Licensing: Although the majority of all OA articles have been published under the CC-BY and CC-BY-NC licence (as required by the RCUK), in approximately 18 cases the articles were published under the CC-BY-NC-SA or CC-BY-NC-ND licences

Length of embargo periods: In 18 out of 27 cases the embargo periods were 12 months and longer

Self-archiving issues: In several cases journals didn’t offer any green options

If we take these points into consideration, the compliance rate for the specified period stands at approximately 67%, as compared to the required 45%. Overall, it’s quite a good result for MVM.

I’m afraid that my introduction has come across all too serious. However, in a face-to-face conversation you may find out that I am not really that bad 😉

-Anna Krzak, Open Access Research Publications Administrator, MVM

Subject disciplines & download figures

Posted on May 29, 2014 by theo

One line summary

Disciplines without dedicated subject repositories seem to provide the most popular items downloaded from our institutional service.

The general trend

Whilst looking at the top 99 most downloaded items from the Edinburgh Research Explorer it struck me that the most popular cluster of subject disciplines were those from the Humanities & Social Sciences.

The pie chart above shows the general breakdown by college with the Humanities and Social Science disciplines making up over half of the most popular items downloaded from our institutional repository. Science and Engineering disciplines own a third of the most popular items, whilst Medicine & Veterinary Medicine make up the remainder.

I was initially surprised given that the bulk of our 18,000+ open access full text items are from the Science, Technology, Engineering & Technology (STEM) fields.

Looking in more detail

When you further sub-divide the broad classification into finer subject groupings you start to see the beginnings of a pattern emerge.

The bar chart above shows the number of items in the top 99 downloads for each school at the University of Edinburgh (apologies for the tiny text – click image to enlarge). Each school broadly maps to a subject area, albeit with some fuzziness; for example, the Edinburgh College of Art comprises a number of creative disciplines like Fine Art, Music and Design brought together in one unit.

Science & Engineering (Red)

From our download figures the most popular S&E subject disciplines – Geosciences, Engineering and Chemistry – all don’t have dedicated subject repositories. Whereas, the least popular – Maths, Physics, Informatics and Biological Sciences – are all well covered by the subject repositories arXiv or PubMed Central.

Humanities & Social Sciences (Blue)

The most downloaded HSS units are the Edinburgh College of Art, the Business School, History, Classics & Archaeology and Social & Political Science; none of which have established methods of sharing via subject repositories.

Economics is already serviced well by RePeC, Psychology & Language Sciences have CogPrints, and Health in Social Sciences is covered by PubMed Central. Only Divinity and Education don’t have subject repositories and have relatively low download rates.

Medicine & Veterinary Medicine (Green)

This college grouping is extremely well covered by the PubMed Central subject repository which may explain the poorer than expected usage performance.

Some closing remarks and limitations

There are no bad results here: all of the open access downloads from our service are complimentary to those obtained directly from publishers websites and from other subject repositories. These downloads can in a way be considered extra views that we help facilitate.

This blog post is only a quick observation and not a fully fledged study so take what I say here with a pinch of salt. Using the number of popular items as a proxy for download rates may not be completely accurate, but on the other hand it does help even out some anomalies (like high download figures for one item skewing the whole data set). To be more comprehensive we should really look at the whole set of 18,000+ items rather than just the top 99. Even with these limitations in mind I still think this is a useful and interesting observation.

2014 download statistics from research.ed.ac.uk

Posted on May 28, 2014 by theo

As well as reporting on the number of open access uploads to our institutional repository we now have the facility to report on the other end of the spectrum – the number of downloads for each item. Here are the top 10 items downloaded from our research portal so far in 2014:

Title	School	Jan-14	Feb-14	Mar-14	Apr-14	May-14	Total
Total	–	28,229	33,418	44,437	47,864	50,092	278,667
The past, present and future of China’s automotive industry	Business School	523	633	993	1199	993	5796
Youth Crime and Justice	School of Law	207	192	272	384	198	2127
The Computer Modelling of Mathematical Reasoning	School of Informatics	198	152	267	187	125	1734
An Introduction to Conditional Random Fields	School of Informatics		66	349	614	656	1685
The double-curvature masonry vaults of Eladio Dieste	Edinburgh College of Art	126	187	234	187	178	1342
Liquidity, Business Cycles and Monetary Policy	School of Economics	59	82	72	78	69	839
The dynamics of solar PV costs and prices as a challenge for technology forecasting	School of Engineering	41	110	164	212	237	835
The Limits to ‘Spin-Off’	School of Social and Political Science	389	121	35	17	19	833
The Adaptive City	Edinburgh College of Art	69	56	98	125	195	818

It is interesting to note that six of the items are from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, whilst the remaining four items are from the College of Science & Engineering. Records from the College of Medicine & Veterinary Medicine are surprisingly absent from the top downloads chart. In fact this trend continues if you look at the top 100 downloaded records. I have a pet theory about this which I will follow up in a separate blog post [EDIT – post available here].

Researchers – what’s new for you from the Library

Posted on May 13, 2014 by theo

“Researchers – what’s new for you from the Library” is an event being held in the Murray Library at the King’s Buildings to highlight some recent developments in Library services and resources for researchers. Places are bookable for all University of Edinburgh staff and research postgraduates via MyEd (see booking links below) or just drop into the Murray Library Ground Floor. Coffee and buns will be available from 12.30.

When: Wednesday 28th May
Where: Murray Library, Ground floor

Programme of talks

Each session is 15 minutes each plus 5 minutes Q&A. Pick and choose which talks you fancy or come along to the whole event:

13:00 – 13.20 – Research Data Management https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=9667

13.30 – 13.50 – Open Access: an overview
https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=9669

14.00 – 14.20 – Post 2014 REF: Open Access requirements
https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=9670

14.30 – 14.50 – Library support for researchers – overview
https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=9671

15.00 – 15.20 – Centre for Research Collections: Science and Engineering historical collections
https://www.events.ed.ac.uk/index.cfm?event=book&scheduleID=9996

If you’ve not been along to the Murray Library before then this is a great excuse to come and check out the new building and it’s excellent facilities. Also, did we mention the free Tea/Coffee and Doughnuts?

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Category Archives: Open Access