UCL Discovery success stories – part 1

This year’s Open Access Week runs from 23-29 October under the theme “Open in order to…” This is an invitation to reflect on many benefits of making research publications openly available. We are excited to present a series of blog posts demonstrating the benefits of making publications open access via UCL Discovery.

Access to research outside universities is often very restricted. Open access extends the audience for research – to academics without subscriptions (including in developing countries), professionals, businesses, civil servants, politicians in local and national government, doctors and patients, teachers and schoolchildren, amateur scholars and other interested laypeople.

UCL Discovery is a long established repository and authors depositing their papers in there benefit from increased visibility of their work. Articles available there are downloaded hundreds of times in many countries across the globe. Today we present some of the highly-downloaded papers from three faculties in UCL’s School of the Built Environment, Engineering and Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

Publication title: King’s Cross: renaissance for whom?
UCL author: Michael Edwards
Publication type: Book chapter
Book title: Urban Design, Urban Renaissance and British Cities
Publication year: 2009
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/14020/
Downloads since deposit: 7,193
Downloads last 12 months: 1,026

This book chapter has been downloaded over 7,000 times since the author deposited it. With more than 1,000 downloads over the last 12 months, and being one the 50 most-downloaded items this year, it is still one of UCL Discovery’s most popular publications from the Faculty of the Built Environment. Wikipedia article on King’s Cross Central links to the UCL Discovery record of the paper. This has no doubt added to the popularity of this publication.

The version that is available in UCL Discovery is the author’s accepted manuscript, and this is the only version of this publication available online. In last 12 months, the chapter has been downloaded in 41 countries in total, and the highest number of downloads came from the United Kingdom (467), United States (221), and Germany (182).

Publication title: Bayesian hierarchical model for the prediction of football results
UCL author: Gianluca Baio
Publication type: Journal article
Journal title: Journal of Applied Statistics
Publication year: 2010
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/16040/
Downloads since deposit: 8,501
Downloads last 12 months: 454

This article deals with statistical modelling of sports data, a popular topic amongst both statisticians and sports fans. The version available in UCL Discovery is the author’s accepted manuscript, and it was downloaded over 8,500 times since deposit, with 454 downloads over last 12 months.

The paper was cited by numerous blogs on football and statistics, with some of the blogs linking to the UCL Discovery version of the paper, for example here. In last 12 months the manuscript was downloaded in 53 countries in total, and the highest number of downloads came from the United Kingdom (103), United States (38), and China (32). The accepted manuscript is openly available in other repositories too.

Come the next World Cup in 2018 we expect another spike of interest in the paper!

Publication title: The Lone Actor Terrorist and the TRAP-18
UCL author: Paul Gill
Publication type: Journal article
Journal title: Journal of Threat Assessment and Management
Publication year: 2016
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1477463/
Downloads since deposit: 1,288
Downloads last 12 months: 940

Articles in UCL Discovery are made available according to publisher’s embargo periods. This means that there may be a delay of 6, 12 or 24 months before they can be made openly available. Fortunately, there is no embargo period on this paper, which has been open access since it was published in April 2016.

This is one of the most recent papers from the Faculty of Engineering that is openly available in UCL Discovery. In last 12 months the manuscript was downloaded in 60 countries, and the highest number of downloads came from the United Kingdom (211), United States (180), and Germany (87).