St Andrews Research Repository reaches 1 million downloads!
The University Library has been celebrating this week as the University’s research repository reaches over 1 million downloads!
This enviable download figure is derived from IRUS-UK – a statistics service for UK repositories that provides accurate, consistent, and comparable usage data. We’ve only been tracking IRUS downloads since January 2014 too, so the actual download figure for the repository is likely to be a great deal higher!
The download figures clearly show the appetite for St Andrews research
For those that don’t already know, the research repository is linked to the University’s research information system Pure, and is the platform used to disseminate University research publications. Publications are uploaded to Pure primarily by academics, research support staff, and the Open Access team in the Library. Once they are checked by the OA team (to ensure they comply with copyright, publisher rules and so on) they are transferred to the repository for public release. A great deal of content is also added directly by Library staff as well as by postgraduate students when submitting their e-theses – currently there are over 2,800 University of St Andrews theses held in the repository! The repository therefore contains a wide variety of content, including journal articles, chapters, reports, theses, and even complete books.
The download figures clearly show the appetite for St Andrews research and the benefit of making this research freely available as early as possible. It is very much a team effort as well, including almost every corner of the University, so we’d like to thank everyone who has contributed content or assisted others in doing so.
The latest quarterly repository statistics update can be viewed here, as well as on the dedicated repository collection, along with previous updates.