Brief statistical analysis of DSpace@ScienceUofK contents (n=101)

  A week after DSpace@ScienceUofK was opened to the U of K range of IP addresses, the content filed in the institutional repository has already reached 100 items. Even if it's not too high a figure yet compared to other IRs, it is a good opportunity for carrying out some preliminary statistical analysis of the items deposited so far in order to identify emerging trends.

First aspect to have a look at is the item distribution by Faculty of Science Departments. There are six departments at F Sci and all of them are already represented in DSpace@ScienceUofK, with Botany, Physics and Zoology as the ones with a higher number of items.


Another interesting indicator is the item distribution by year of publication. Ideally, the repository should offer a representation of the research currently being carried out at the Faculty, so the more recent the filed items, the better. However, plenty of F Sci research publications have never been made available on the Internet before, so offering them Open Access from DSpace@ScienceUofK is just as good a contribution as depositing recent papers.


The figure shows 60% of the contents currently available in the repository were published along the last 5 years, which is quite a remarkable rate of modernity.

Finally, a critical indicator is examined, namely the type of access to the items filed so far at DSpace@ScienceUofK. We intend to find out what rate of the contents is at the moment being offered Open Access. Ideally all items filed in an Open Access Institutional Repository such as DSpace@ScienceUofK should be available Open Access, but in practice it is frequent that a small percentage of them remains closed when publishers do not grant the required permissions.


The results from the statistical analysis for n=101 show wide differences by discipline (with Physics traditionally being the most OA-friendly) and some room for improvement in this regard.

When DSpace@ScienceUofK training sessions are carried out later this month, indications will be provided to authors and repository managers on what full-text version of papers may be filed in the repository according to the publishers' policies. The rate of items available Open Access (presently almost 50%) will surely rise as a consequence.