Guest Post by Dominic Allington-Smith (Open Access Publications Manager)

Maryam Khan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UCL Discovery, UCL’s institutional repository, has hit another milestone! UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team are excited to share that on Friday 18 July, the number of downloads reached the 60 million mark. 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 1,100 outputs in the repository every month (average figure for the current academic year).

The 60 millionth download was of the interim report ‘Young people & coastal communities: Local policymaker and practitioner perspectives’ produced by the UCL Coastal Youth Life Chances project led by Professor Avril Keating.  This research project examines how growing up in coastal communities in England impacts the life chances of young people. The report arises from the project team’s conversations with 50 policymakers and practitioners from around England about their perspectives on the challenges facing young adults aged 15-20.

At the time of writing, UCL Discovery hosts over 193,200 open access publications, comprising mostly self-archived copies of research outputs, but also including doctoral and research master’s theses (contemporary submissions and historic digitisations), and books published by UCL Press.  Since the 50 million downloads milestone in June 2024, the following titles are the highest-downloaded publications for each UCL Faculty, Institute or School. This list continues to reflect the diversity across UCL research:

• Faculty of Arts and Humanities: Цифровые гуманитарные науки Хрестоматия / Digital humanities: in search of definitions (book, 2017)
• Faculty of Laws: Artificial Intelligence, Education and Assessment at UCL Laws: Current Thinking and Next Steps for the UK Legal Education Sector (working/discussion paper, 2025)
• School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies: The Gesta Hungarorum of Anonymus, the Anonymous Notary of King Béla: A Translation (journal article, 2009)*
• Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences: The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Reflections by Noam Chomsky and others after 50 years (UCL Press book, 2019)
• Faculty of the Built Environment (Bartlett): Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier (UCL Press book, 2025)
• Faculty of Engineering Sciences: Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge (journal article, 2017)
• Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences: The Traditional Four Steps Transportation Modeling Using a Simplified Transport Network: A Case Study of Dhaka City, Bangladesh (journal article, 2012)*
• Faculty of Brain Sciences: What is mentalization? The concept and its foundations in developmental research (book chapter, 2012)*
• Faculty of Life Sciences: FIP Global Pharmacy Workforce Report 2012 (report, 2012)
• Faculty of Medical Sciences: Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (UCL Press book, 2016)*
• Faculty of Population Health Sciences: Global, regional, and national burden of stroke and its risk factors, 1990-2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (journal article, 2021)
• Institute of Education: Intelligence Unleashed: An argument for AI in Education (report, 2016)

* These publications are also the highest-downloaded of all time.

Hitting 60 million downloads highlights the reach and potential which comes from sharing research through UCL Discovery. There are a number of ways you can do this, primarily through sharing your research publications via UCL RPS and Profiles. You might also want to consider sharing other types of outputs such as data, code and software to further enhance the visibility and reproducibility of your work. UCL’s Research Data Management team maintain a guide on best practice for software sustainability, preservation and sharing, and can give further support to UCL researchers as required.

Another year of sharing research, and another incredible milestone – congratulations to everyone involved! Let’s keep it up and continue pursuing open access at UCL to ensure we are reaching the widest audience and having the greatest impact.

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Booking is now open for training on RPS and the REF open access policy in April. Last term’s training sessions proved very popular, and feedback received was extremely positive: respondents found sessions very useful (65%) or useful (35%).

All UCL authors are required to maintain a list of their publications in UCL’s Research Publication Service (RPS). To comply with the REF open access policy, they must also upload the final accepted manuscript version of their research articles and conference proceedings to RPS. This needs to be done no later than three months after first online publication. The Open Access Team review the manuscript and make it open access through UCL Discovery, UCL’s open access repository.

Our training sessions will explain the REF open access policy and what to do to comply with its requirements. They will also show you how to, in RPS:

• set up name-based search settings
• use all the advantages of RPS’s automated claiming tool (including linking RPS to your ORCID ID)
• record a publication
• upload a file

The sessions will be a good opportunity to ask questions about RPS and the REF open access policy, and they are open to all UCL staff and interested research students. New members of staff, and anyone who is unsure about any of the features mentioned above, are strongly encouraged to attend. Regular reports on compliance with the REF open access policy, and on academics’ use of RPS, are sent to Faculty Deans and Heads of Department. 

Upcoming sessions

Thursday, 4^th April, 14:00 – 15:00
Foster Court, room 132

Tuesday, 30^th April, 11:00 – 12:00
Foster Court, room 235

To book, and if you have any questions, please email: open-access@ucl.ac.uk
Also let us know if you would like to organise group training or drop-in sessions in your department.