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 Laws, Arts and Humanities, and Social and Historical Sciences.

Publication title: The Rule in Wilkinson v Downton: Conduct, Intention, and Justifiability
UCL author: Ying Liew
Publication type: Journal article
Journal title: Modern Law Review
Publication year: 2015
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1460156/
Downloads since deposit: 1,214
Downloads last 12 months: 1,119

Wilkinson v Downtown is a famous English tort law decision from 1897 that recognised the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. This paper is in top 10 papers downloaded last month in the Faculty of Laws.

The version that is available in UCL Discovery is the author’s accepted manuscript, and this version of the article is also available in SSRN database, from where it was downloaded over 300 times. Over last 12 months the manuscript in UCL Disocvery was downloaded in 58 countries, and the highest number of downloads came from the United Kingdom (414), Australia (72) and United States (53).

Publication title: Brexit
UCL author: Veronique Munoz-Dardé
Publication type: Journal article
Journal title: The Philosophers’ Magazine
Publication year: 2016
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1527367/
Downloads since deposit: 827
Downloads last 12 months: 827

The author’s accepted manuscript of this essay is available from November 2016, and since then it was downloaded over 800 times, with peak downloads in March (150), at the time when the Article 50 was triggered. There is also a free version of this paper available on The Philosopher’s Magazine website.

In last 12 months, the article was downloaded in 48 countries, and the highest number of downloads came from the United Kingdom (377), United States (72), and Germany (55).

Publication title: Culture and health
UCL authors: Beverly Butler, Joseph Calabrese, Angel Chater, Helen Chatterjee, Francois Guesnet, Robert Horne, Sushrut Jadhav, David Napier, Sonu Shamdasani, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Linda Thomson, Amanda Williams, Christopher Willott, James Wilson, Katherine Wolf
Publication type: Journal article
Journal title: Lancet
Publication year: 2014
Discovery URL: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1452529/
Downloads since deposit: 1,092
Downloads last 12 months: 674

This paper reviews health and health practices as they relate to culture, and the authors show how inseparable health is from culturally affected perceptions of wellbeing. The version available in UCL Discovery is the author’s accepted manuscript, and Google Scholar provides a link to the UCL Discovery record of the paper.

The manuscript in UCL Discovery is available from May 2015, and since then it was downloaded over 1,000 times. In last 12 months the article was downloaded in 59 countries, and the highest number of downloads came from United States (217), the United Kingdom (97), and Australia (41).