Hi
I'm not a librarian, so I may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, but might a growth in accesses to author-deposited copies of papers in institutional repositories also be affecting the usage statistics?
I mention this following yesterday's blog post on The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? - see
[1].
This echoes the evidence I have found that using social media to alerts one's peers to new papers can be successful. In my case a paper "A challenge to web accessibility metrics and guidelines: putting people and processes first" [2] was presented at the W4A 2012 conference on Monday 16 April 2012. The paper was mentioned in a blog post before the conference [3] and links to the paper tweeted - which resulted in 100 downloads - for more than is normally the case when a new paper is made available.
I appreciate that such experiences will not be relevant in many disciplines, but in my field (and in open science more widely) might not a decline in access simply reflect the increasing use and value of institutional repositories and motivated researchers providing direct access to their papers?
Brian
References
1 The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?, Melissa Terras, Impact of Social Sciences blog, 19 April 2012, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/04/19/blog-tweeting-papers-worth-it/#more-6417
2 A challenge to web accessibility metrics and guidelines: putting people and processes first. In: W4A 2012: 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, Cooper, M., Sloan, D., Kelly, B. and Lewthwaite, S.2. 16-18 April 2012, Lyon., http://opus.bath.ac.uk/29190/
3 Are You a Marxist in Your Approaches to Research? Kelly, B. UK Web Focus blog, 13 April 2012, http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/are-you-a-marxist-in-your-research/
4
lis-e-resources is a UKSG list - http://www.uksg.org/serials
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