Finetuning of download counts

New filtering techniques are soon to be employed on Digital Commons sites, the e-publications@ bond software platform, that will dramatically change Bond’s digital repository download statistics.   Numbers will decrease considerably, but they will be more accurate. 

Just like spam adds to the gross volume of email, there are automated processes artificially inflating the numbers of hits on Bond’s repository papers.    A recent analysis of thousands of log files has confirmed that the integrity of our download statistics is compromised by the activity of sophisticated robots, crawlers and spam-bots (RACS) trawling the internet. 

This discovery has motivated bepress, the provider of Digital Commons, to completely re-write their filtering technology to remove machine downloads and other anomalies.  Digital Commons now meets and significantly exceeds COUNTER, an industry standard for online usage statistics.  For more information see  http://www.bepress.com/download_counts.html. 

Download counts and usage statistics continue to grow in importance as more scholarship is placed online, and Bond University researchers can take comfort that this latest upgrade will assist them in assessing the impact of their publications with far more accuracy than in the past.   

If your papers are in e-publications@ bond you will soon receive an email from Digital Commons announcing their new filtering system has been implemented.  The ensuing result will be future monthly full-text download reports that are more accurate and therefore a more reliable source by which you can monitor reader interest in your research.

Over 1,000 good reasons to read on . . .

Over 1,000 papers are now available online through e-publications@Bond.

Bond’s digital repository has achieved this milestone within a year of its formal launch last November. Steady growth has been accomplished with contributions of articles from every faculty, together with the recent appearance of some notable Bond University journals such as Spreadsheets in Education and Bond University Student Law Review who have made e-publications@ Bond their official home. 

The 1,000th paper in fact belongs to our latest addition to the journal fold, Bond Law Review.  This journal commenced in 1989 and it continues to be an influential publication today.  The upload of all available volumes is expected to be completed in the very near future.

Explore the world of research at Bond University and see what our academics are writing and publishing. The repository provides open access to theses, pre-prints and post-prints of journal articles, conference papers and book chapters, and is indexed by Google, Yahoo and many other search engines.
We always welcome new contributions from our academic staff – please contact the e-publications coordinator for further information.

Bond Law Review is on the move

It is at an early stage at present, but the migration of Bond Law Review from its current home on the University website to epublications@ Bond has begun. Over the next week or two all 18 volumes will be uploaded to the repository.

You can see it take shape here — Bond Law Review

What’s been happening in epubs?

As part of the Higher Education Research Data Collection this year, all of the papers counted in HERDC have been recorded in epublications@ Bond. In cases where archiving the pre or post print was not possible, only links to publishers’s sites have been provided to help drive readership of those papers. Where full text is archived, full citations of the published version and a link to the publisher’s site is also provided.

In conjunction with recording the HERDC submissions, personal researcher pages were created for the authors. These pages show selected works for authors. Where possible we are also providing a complete list of publications even if all of the papers are not archived individually in the repository. Over time, the personal researcher pages will be developed to provide as complete a list of publications as possible without requiring a PDF version of the author’s list of writings.

Spreadsheets in education (eJSIE) is now fully hosted in epublications@ Bond. Congratulations to Steve Sugden for being the first editor to try out the journal management functionality within the respository. eJSIE allows authors to submit their articles online and provides an interface for the administration of the peer-review process. eJSIE joins four law journals in the repository.

Some recent statistics

• Full text downloads for April, May and June exceeded 10000 in each month.
• 258 papers added over the same 3 months
• 70 personal researcher pages

Farewell Bruce

Well Bruce’s time on this project was shorter than we all expected, but during his time with us we saw a strong growth in content within the repository. The number of personal researcher pages grew to over 60, and the total number of pages to over 850. Thanks Bruce for your great work on the repository. We wish you all the best in your new position.

Antoinette Cass is now continuing the work on the repository in a part-time capacity along with her role as copyright coordinator.

Global reach

Where are Bond’s research papers being read? Based on the referring URLs to downloads from epublications@ Bond, here is the distribution.

North America 44%
Australia & South Pacific 32%
Europe 14%
Asia 7%
Africa 1%
Middle East 1%
South America 1%

As at April 2007

Scholarly publishing and open access

 Last week Bruce Ibsen and I met with a few staff from the Business School to talk about Bond’s repository and how they could start to get their papers uploaded.

Since then, David Robinson has acquired a substantial presence in the repository with a personal researcher page featuring journal articles and conference papers. 

At the meeting there was some discussion about possible changes to the scholarly publishing landscape, brought about by the open access movement. Repositories are one of the contributors to increased availability of research to the masses via the Internet without a pay to view cost.

For those interested in reading more about scholarly publishing and open access, Kennan and Kautz’s paper may be of useful. The paper has been accepted for the ECIS 2007 conference in June, but is already openly accessible on DLIST (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology). So you can read about open access and experience it at the same time.

The author’s include a diagram showing possibilities for scholarly publishing enabled by developments in information technology. This model is quite different to the models described for traditional print-based publishing and its derivative model for electronic journal publishing.

They conclude that changes in scholarly publishing are being motivated by new technical opportunities and that they are emerging without a full understanding of the implications for communication and publishing in the scholarly world.

Kennan, Mary Anne and Kautz, Karlheinz (2007) Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Searching for Understanding of an Emerging IS Phenomenon. In Proceedings ECIS 2007 – The 15th European Conference on Information Systems, St Gallen, Switzerland.

Bruce Ibsen joins the team

Bruce Ibsen was recently appointed to help build the collection of research papers in the repository. Bruce worked previously in the Library on the Bond in Pictures project.

Welcome back Bruce.

If you have research papers you would like uploaded to the repository or want some advice about ePublications@ Bond, please contact Bruce.

Bruce_Ibsen @ bond.edu.au 
07 55951529

More Law journals

The Law Faculty now has 4 journals and 1 newsletter being published in ePublications@ Bond. Sports Law eJournal and Corporate Governance eJournal are taking shape alongside Revenue Law Journal and the Bond University Student Law Review.

We look forward to adding Spreadsheets in Education to the list of ePublications@ Bond journals in the very near future. This will be the first journal to make use of the journal management functionality built into Digital Commons. This functionality enables online submission of articles, assignment of reviewers and version control.

 View Bond’s journals in ePublications@ Bond.