At a recent meeting with two of the University of Bath PVCs, the PVC for
Research told me that my name had been mentioned at a recent meeting
about the University of Bath repository, as it had been brought to her
attention that I had had the largest number of downloads in the
repository. I was asked to describe the approaches I'd taken with
other researchers at Bath University. I explained that I had submitted
a paper to the Open Repositories 2012 conference about this - so my host
institution has had a few weeks to exploit the approaches :-)
As described in a blog post posted earlier today -
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/paper-accepted-for-or12/
- the success seems to be based on incoming links to my papers from
popular researcher profiler services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu.
My co-author Jenny Delasalle, University of Warwick has been looking at
use of such services across the sector - but we have found little
evidence of pro-active encouragement for use of such services. However,
ironically, our paper highlights how commercial publishers are
encouraging their authors to use such services to link to papers hosted
behind the publishers' paywalls.
Note the paper (available at http://opus.bath.ac.uk/30227/ ) looks at
other possible reasons - the papers might be brilliant (not the case!);
the co-authors may attract interest; the availability of the papers in
HTML format may enhance their ranking; etc. - and makes the point that
downloads aren't in themselves, an indicator of quality - although
enhancing the numbers of downloads, especially to targetted audiences
which you may get if one connects with one's peers using such services,
can enhance the likelihood that practitioners may take up the ideas in a
paper and researchers cite the ideas.
I'd be interested in hearing if people are encouraging use of such
services in the way that commercial publishers seem to be doing - and
perhaps talking to interested parties who are attending OR12. If you'd
like to meet up at OR12, my OR12 Crowdvine profile is at
http://or2012.crowdvine.com/profiles/204996
A slidecast based on the ideas in the paper, lasting 4 mins 47 seconds,
is available at
http://www.slideshare.net/lisbk/kelly-delasalle
Thanks
Brian
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Brian Kelly
Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK, BA2 7AY
Phone: 01225 383943
Email: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly
Web: http://isc.ukoln.ac.uk/
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