Hail Caledonia!
St Andrew’s Day is a good day to reflect on Scottish influences on the world. Perhaps it’s also a good day to consider alternative Caledonias and one in particular on the other side of the globe.
We are constantly looking to see how St Andrews research is used and reused across the world. Each month we get a usage report from EThOS the national thesis database for the UK, a service provided by the British Library. St Andrews open access full text theses are made available in EThOS as well as in our own institutional repository Research@StAndrews:FullText. The report from EThOS indicates how many theses have been viewed and downloaded and it gives us some limited information about the reader, chiefly their professional sector, if provided, and their geographical location. Most readers are involved in education and research and the majority are in Europe and North America. But we can see an increasing readership from all continents and our interest is particularly sparked by unusual new locations.
Our most recent report showed a number of thesis downloads from a small island nation some 9928 miles away (as the crow flies) in the Pacific Ocean:
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| Source: http://www.distancefromto.net/ |
Someone in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia was clearly interested in 3 of our social anthropology theses:
- Kinship and the saturation of life among the Kuna of Panamá by Margherita Margiotti http://hdl.handle.net/10023/891
- Carving wood and creating shamans : an ethnographic account of visual capacity among the Kuna of Panamá by Paolo Fortis http://hdl.handle.net/10023/523
- Fertile words : aspects of language and sociality among Yanomami people of Venezuela by Javier Carrera Rubio http://hdl.handle.net/10023/1003
We couldn’t help but wonder who might this be? Was it one of New Caledonia’s 268,767 inhabitants? Are they studying at L’Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie?
Do they do their research looking out over views like this and sitting on this pine fringed beach?
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By Bahnfrend (Own work)
Kanumera Bay, Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, 2007 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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Perhaps there were some connections between St Andrews research interests and New Caledonia?
A quick search of the University website uncovered a remarkable relationship:
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| Detail from Figure 1. St Clair, J. J. H. et al. Experimental resource pulses influence social-network dynamics and the potential for information flow in tool-using crows. Nat. Commun. 6:7197 doi: 10.1038/ncomms8197 (2015). (Open Access) |
We don’t really need to know who in New Caledonian has been reading St Andrews research. The whole point of open access to our research is that it can easily be consumed by a global audience and that it can be of benefit and use without barriers to a variety of users.