UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team are delighted to announce that UCL’s institutional repository, UCL Discovery, reached the milestone of 20 million downloads on 5 April 2019. UCL Discovery is UCL’s open access repository, showcasing and providing access to UCL research outputs from all UCL disciplines. UCL authors currently deposit around 1,700 outputs in the repository every month. 

Our 20 millionth download was of a dataset: Aldridge, R; (2019) Causes of death among homeless people: a population-based cross-sectional study of linked hospitalisation and mortality data in England. [Dataset]. Wellcome Open: London, UK, which supports an article on causes of death among homeless people in Wellcome Open Research, a platform that allows rapid publication and transparent peer-review. This demonstrates the combined value of open research data, open peer review and open access to research publications.

The article’s corresponding author, Dr Robert Aldridge, deposited the dataset in UCL Discovery at the end of February 2019. Dr Aldridge is a Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Health Informatics. He uses data and digital technologies to investigate and improve the health of the public, with a particular focus on the burden of disease marginalised communities. The article and accompanying dataset, analysing the causes of death of homeless people across England and concluding that almost a third of them were due to treatable illnesses, rather than hypothermia or alcohol and drug overdoses, typifies this line of research. See UCL News for more information about the article.

UCL is committed to supporting researchers with making research data open access, and will officially be launching its new Research Data Repository on Wednesday, 5th June. The service will enable UCL authors to publish their research data, make it discoverable and citable, meet funder requirements and preserve their data long-term. The launch event will take place from 5-7pm in room W3.01 IOE, 20 Bedford Way. David Price, UCL Vice-Provost (Research), will introduce this event and Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services), will present an update on how UCL is supporting Open Science, with a demonstration of the repository from Figshare as well as a user case study.  Wine, nibbles and soft drinks will be provided. Please register for a ticket here.