UCL Discovery Blog

The Research Publications System (RPS) will not be available between 09:00 to 11.00 on Wednesday 16th May, as the system is being upgraded.

In a speech yesterday to about 100 publishers at the Publishers Association’s annual general meeting, the UK Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, praised the outstanding science and research capacity/output of the UK and outlined the Coalition Government’s commitment “to sustaining this excellence”.

While David Willetts referred to the value which publishers add to science and research and acknowledged the invaluable role peer review plays in the research process, he also stressed that “open access was the way forward”.

In 2011, following transparency discussions initiated at a high level round table meeting by the David Willetts MP, an independent Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings was established to examine how UK-funded research findings can be made more accessible. David Willetts said the government was committed to maintaining a dialogue with the industry as part of the Working Group chaired by Dame Janet Finch.

He called for a partnership between the Government and the publishing industry to make improvements to editing and sorting research output and to make publicly funded research publicly and freely available. A principle that he sees as going “well beyond the academic community”.

In his speech David Willetts reported that the Finch Working Group is looking at versions of the Green and Gold Open Access models, although any final decisions on which OA publishing model(s) the Government will recommend to researchers and the publishing industry will only be made when Dame Finch’s final report is received. He added that “it is necessary to strike a suitable balance between enabling revenue generation for publishers via subscriptions and providing public access to publicly funded information”.

The Government’s commitment to Open Access does not stop at UK research. The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills will soon be discussing Open Access initiatives with representatives of the European Commission. In his speech David Willetts reported that Open Access issues are already being debated in the US. “The US Committee on Economic Development, for example, advocates building on open access initiatives taken by the National Institute of Health, arguing that the costs involved are outweighed by the economic benefits derived from greater utilisation of research”.

The full speech can be read at:
http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-public-access-to-research

A report of David Willett’s speech in The Bookseller can be found at:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/willetts-reveals-finch-open-access-proposals.html

Details and minutes of the Working Group can be accessed via:
http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/wg-expand-access/

The OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) Foundation recently announced the launch of their Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

According to the OAPEN Foundation, the primary aim of DOAB is to increase the discoverability of Open Access books and to make them available to readers with as few restrictions as possible. All the books are peer-reviewed and are available in a range of subjects with a particularly strong presence in History and Social Sciences.

Although the service has only just been launched, DOAB already contains over 750 academic books from just over 20 publishers, all available under an Open Access licence. The OAPEN Foundation invite other publishers to participate with benefits including increased dissemination, visibility and impact of their publications.

More information is available in the Press Release.

UCL Discovery publications details can be used to generate personal and departmental publications lists. Updated information on how to embed our publications details is available on our information page for webmasters.

UCL’s Research Publications Service (RPS) also provides a similar service with access to publications data entered or harvested in RPS. Instructions on how to use publications data direct from RPS can be found at the ISD page: Including RPS data on your webpages.

The UCL Discovery Top 20 download statistics for February 2012 are available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/last-month.html.

The top two papers in January 2012 are reversed in their download order in February 2012, although both papers have proved very popular this month. The WCRF/AICR Expert Report ‘‘Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective’‘, leads the Top 20 downloads with over 1100 downloads, whilst the 2004 IFS briefing paper ‘The ‘fat tax’: economic incentives to reduce obesity’ saw 970 downloads this month .

There were no new entries to the Top 20 downloads this month.

UCL Discovery currently has 6,793 full text records available on an Open Access basis. These freely available research papers have led to nearly 2 million downloads, of which 75% were by people overseas (i.e. not in the UK).

The UCL Discovery Top 20 download statistics for January 2012 are available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/last-month.html.

The three most downloaded papers in January 2012 mirror the top three downloads in 2011.

The 2004 IFS briefing paper ‘The ‘fat tax’: economic incentives to reduce obesity’ proved to be the most popular full text item to download in UCL Discovery in 2011 and in January 2012.

The second most popular paper is the WCRF/AICR Expert Report ‘‘Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective’‘, and third Dr Kassem’s thesis The legal aspects of seaworthiness: current law and development undertaken at Swansea University.

There are three new items to the Top 20 downloads:

The 2011 article ‘Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists’ by Claire Ross, Dr Melissa Terras, Professor Claire Warwick and Anne Welsh published in the Journal of Documentation;

The 2008 chapter Mapping the East End ‘Labyrinth’ by Dr Laura Vaughan, published in a book that accompanied the Museum of London’s exhibition on Jack the Ripper and the East End Labyrinth; and,

The 2009 article Testing the ‘Laacher See hypothesis’: a health hazard perspective by Felix Riede published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The 2011 annual download statistics are now available via http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/past_stats/annual-2011.html.

The total number of downloads for 2011 (584,965) sees a 10% increase on full text access in 2010. Apart from July and August 2011, monthly downloads totalled over 45,000 each month.

The origin of the downloads identifies the global interest in UCL research; of the 584,965 downloads for 2011, the top 10 countries for people accessing full text in UCL Discovery are the UK: 112,713 downloads (or 19.3% of the total), the United States: 101,536 (or 17.4%), France: 38,068 (or 6.5%), Germany: 23,543 (or 4%), China: 19,639 (or 3.4%), India: 18,102 (or 3.1%), Australia: 16,182 (or 2.8%), Japan: 12,441 (or 2.15), Canada: 11,729 (or 2%), and ‘Korea, Republic of’: 9,502 (or 1.6%). Please note that the percentages by country are for the total downloads in 2011 – interest by country varies item by item and can be seen in individual record statistics.

The 2011 annual downloads statistics also identifies the top 50 most downloaded items for the year. The most popular paper for 2011 was the IFS briefing paper ‘The ‘fat tax’: economic incentives to reduce obesity’ by Andrew Leicester and Frank Windmeijer, with 10,660 downloads. This paper has been the most downloaded paper for seven months in 2011, as seen in our monthly top 20 downloads.

Nine papers feature in the 2011 top 50 most downloaded items that were not in the monthly statistics for the same year. They include three UCL theses: from the Bartlett School of Planning – ‘The urban development of Damascus: a study of its past, present and future’ by Zara Lababedi; from the Eastman Dental Institute – ‘Factors Affecting Outcome of Non-Surgical Root Canal Treatment’ by Dr Yuan Ling Ng; and from the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies – ‘Digital fabrication inspired design: Influence of fabrication parameters on a design process’ by Agata Guzik.

The nine papers also include two IFS publications: ‘Evaluación del Programa Familias en Acción: Subsidios Condicionados de la Red de Apoyo Social. Informe de la Linea de Base (Ajustado)’ by Professor Orazio Attanasio, Professor Costas Meghir and Dr Marcos Marcos Vera-Hernandez; and ‘A retrospective on Friedman’s Theory of Permanent Income’ by Professor Costas Meghir.

The other four items new to the download statistics are: the UCL SSEES paper ‘Foreign Direct Investment and Restructuring in the Automotive Industry in Central and East Europe’ by Professor Slavo Radosevic; the UCL CASA paper ‘GIS and urban design’ by Professor Mike Batty, Dr Martin Dodge, Dr Bin Jiang, and Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith; the Space Syntax book chapter ‘Space is the machine, part one: theoretical preliminaries’ by Professor Bill Hillier; and the Road Safety Research report ‘Trends in fatal car-occupant accidents’ by Heather Ward, Dr Nicola Christie, Professor Ronan Lyons, Jeremy Broughton, Professor David Clarke and Patrick Ward.

A new briefing by Alma Swan on the impact of Open Access on researchers, universities and society, commissioned by Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), is now available as PDF at RLUK

The briefing outlines the latest evidence on increased impact for researchers in terms of visibility, usage and citation, together with a description of the benefits for the profile of institutions and the wider economic impact for society.

According to the briefing, researchers gain from the increased usage and impact of their work. By depositing their research in Open Access (OA) repositories (such as UCL Discovery) their work is more easily retrieved due to search engines indexing OA repository content.

Alma Swan goes on to highlight that without OA, visibility is restricted to subscription or paper per view access. The increased visibility, on the other hand, accords increased usage as seen by repository download statistics and an increase in citations. Alma Swan states that “citations tend to rise when an author starts making his or her work Open Access” and highlights the benefits from making work Open Access as early as possible given that ‘citations feed upon citations’.

In terms of benefits to institutions, Alma Swan reports that “a repository is an excellent showcase for any university eager to build its profile and reputation”. Institutions benefit from the ‘aggregated usage and impact of their researchers’ as a result of the increased visibility Open Access brings.

By demonstrating their research portfolios, institutions can strengthen their competitive position, transfer knowledge and know-how to the education and business communities, seed potential collaborations and industrial and business partnerships, and demonstrate the value that they bring to society.

The full briefing can be found at http://www.rluk.ac.uk/files/OA Impact briefing.pdf

The UCL Discovery Top 20 download statistics for December 2011 are available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/last-month.html. The Top 20 downloads for the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2011 are also available by Faculty via http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/past_stats/faculty/.

The 2004 IFS briefing paper ‘The ‘fat tax’: economic incentives to reduce obesity’ continues to be the most downloaded of the month, whilst also being the most downloaded paper Q4 2011 for the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, and the most downloaded paper overall in Q4 2011 .

New to the monthly Top 20 downloads for 2011 is the 1999 Institute for Fiscal Studies report Household Saving in the UK by Professor James Banks and Sarah Tanner.

Whilst many popular papers have been highlighted in the monthly Top 20 download statistics, such as the 2004 IFS briefing paper ‘The ‘fat tax’: economic incentives to reduce obesity’ from the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, our Top 20 downloads by Faculty for Q4 2011 highlight a larger range of popular UCL research papers.

For example, the most downloaded paper in Q4 2011 from the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences was the 2008 UCL doctoral thesis Factors Affecting Outcome of Non-Surgical Root Canal Treatment by Dr. Yuan Ling Ng.

From the Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences, the 2009 UCL doctoral thesis Nanoparticles and photosensitisers; their interactions and antibacterial properties by Dr. Naima Narband was the most downloaded item in Q4 2011.

From the Faculty of Life Sciences, the 2008 Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine Volume Superbugs and superdrugs: the history of MRSA edited by Lois Reynolds and Dr Tilli Tansey was the most downloaded item.

From the Faculty of Laws, the 2001 article Priority as Pathology: The Pari Passu Myth by Professor Riz Mokal was the most downloaded item in Q4 2011.

From SSEES, the most downloaded paper is the 2005 working paper Foreign Direct Investment and Restructuring in the Automotive Industry in Central and East Europe by Professor Slavo Radošević.

Further quarterly statistics by Faculty can be seen at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/past_stats/faculty/.

Our latest records can be found via the link on our homepage or via our Twitter feed. You can also use our advanced search options to locate items of interest.

In the report Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth, recently published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the UK Government renews its commitment to making publicly funded research freely available and calls on the Research Councils to take steps ensure researchers fulfil funding requirements.

The Government recognises that free and open access to publicly funded research offers ‘significant social and economic benefits by spreading knowledge, raising the prestige of UK
research and encouraging technology transfer’. Whilst the Government highlights institutional open access repositories as one example of good practice in regards to making research available, it stresses the need for more research to be open access both in repositories and in open access publishing. It is concerned that a considerable amount of publicly funded research is both difficult to find and expensive to access which in turn can limit ‘understanding and innovation’.

In order to address the disparities in open access practices, the Government will look at a number of pending reports on ways to improve access to research. This will include a report by an independent working group chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a former vice chancellor of Keele University, and a report by the Royal Society.

The ‘Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth’ BIS report also looks at ways to increase the development of knowledge and innovation in the UK. The Government suggests that Higher Education consortia are beneficial in tackling ‘large-scale and ground-breaking new research beyond the capabilities of a single institution. The Government also suggests the need for greater links between research outputs and commercial products and services and has announced a new £75m fund to help small business develop new products based on research findings. The report also states that up to £250,000 will be invested in a series of prizes to be awarded to groups of people who can solve specific scientific problems.

In his open response in UCL News, Professor David Price empahises the need for long-term sustainable funding if the success of the UK research base, and related growth of the UK’s economy, is to continue. Professor Price also draws attention to the ‘broad spectrum of excellence’ in several UK universities, such as UCL, that can address research challenges ‘in a more effective way than across a consortium’.