The report that convinved prime minister Boris Johnson to lock down our country was the most downloaded academic COVID-19 study in March 2020 among universities and research centres contributing to Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS).
UK institutions which are responsible for the top ten most downloaded COVID-19 content ;in March include Imperial College London, London School of Economics, University College London and the Institute of Development Studies.
But what do the top ten COVID-19 studies tell us about the use of open access materials and the role that institutional repositories (IRs) play in this context?
The role of institutional repositories
There are 258 institutional repositories (IRs) in the UK, which collect, preserve, and disseminate digital copies of the scholarly output of universities and research institutions.
Stats on the use of content stored in repositories are crucial to show the impact of open access (OA) research. Measures to assess the impact of OA publishing involve a range of metrics, including citations, page views, altmetrics and download statistics. Usage metrics support the understanding of how publicly available research is being used.
“But in an open access environment, where multiple versions of research papers proliferate and access is fragmented and happening across multiple platforms, tracking usage is problematic,”
says Jo Lambert, service manager for IRUS and Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP).
“Aggregating usage statistics from institutional repositories can provide a mechanism to understand that fragmented picture by applying a standardised approach. IRUS brings together usage data from repositories in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US and data from CORE, which hosts the world's largest collection of open access full texts.”
Repository usage on a global scale
The list of most downloaded coronavirus research essentially provides a proof of concept to illustrate what happens when various parties adopt an international standardised data on usage of research published in institutional repositories.
John Murtagh, open access manager at Imperial College London, explains:
“Some of the research that has generated the most impact in terms of readership numbers and real-world policy was published in our repository, Spiral, and under Creative Commons licenses.
“This is huge encouragement for Imperial to continue promoting the repository and open access model to our researchers as a means of disseminating knowledge.
"But that is not the whole picture. As the COVID-19 report put before Mr Johnson was initially uploaded to the authors’ website before being deposited in our repository, it will have received a significant number of downloads that the IRUS figure does not include.
“However, the attention that this report and other COVID-19 outputs have received will contribute to a wider strategy of promoting the institutional repository as a suitable venue for disseminating quick turn-around research and other grey literature, such as briefing papers and reports.”
Although almost all UK universities with repositories are using IRUS, which is a service run by Jisc, understanding the global picture of repository usage is the ultimate aim, says Jo Lambert. Still, IRUS-UK provides a solution towards developing a more coherent picture of usage, wherever that usage occurs.
How institutional repositories are critical in supporting access
As usage of COVID-19 research indicates, institutional repositories are playing a critical role in supporting early, open and unrestricted access to scientific, scholarly information.
The crisis is clearly prompting significant changes to the creation, distribution and use of research.
“Many publishers and content suppliers are making COVID-19 related content openly available and free to read on a temporary basis during the current pandemic, but it remains to be seen whether this will result in lasting change,"
says Tracy Zussman, publishing and research data coordinator at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).
“It will be interesting to see how or whether publishers maintain and even build on recently implemented moves to remove barriers to access as and when demand for COVID-19 research changes or subsides.
“We do hope that the widespread support for removing barriers to access for COVID-19 research, and the spirit of global research cooperation that this is part of, will help to us move to a more open and equitable model for research in the future.”
Camilla Ridgewell, repository manager at the London School of Economics, adds:
“The current situation has proved it’s possible for publishers to make their content open access, and I hope this can be used as justification for a reconsideration of the traditional models when things return to normal.
“Taken together with the forthcoming consultation on open access being undertaken by UKRI, and the introduction of Plan S, we will undoubtedly see some changes to the OA landscape in the not too distant future.”
No comments:
Post a Comment