Institutional repositories, social media and academic publication: a simple experiment

"[I]n mid-November I started to use Twitter to advertise the existence of some of the papers I have deposited in the Leicester Research Archive (LRA)....Partway through this process it occurred to me that I had stumbled into a little experiment. So in the end I selectively tweeted about 8 of the 27 documents I currently have in the LRA. Admittedly these were probably the 8 papers that I felt were of most interest to the broader community on Twitter, but this did not mean they had previously received the most hits in the archive. In fact, if you rank the 25 works that had been in the Leicester repository throughout the 6 months (May to October 2011) from most to least popular, then these 8 were ranked: 4th, 5th, 10th, 12th, 13th, 18th, 23rd and 24th= (2 documents were not added to the archive until November)....All of the resources promoted via Twitter were accessed more times than any of the resources that were not advertised in this way....Apart from the resources that were newly listed in the archive in November (and de facto got 100% of their views within that month), the highest scores for “hits in November as percentage of lifetime hits” were also all for the promoted articles....[The] highest two resources (as a percentage of lifetime views) were for articles that had been listed in the archive for several months, but had only had an authors’ draft copy deposited as a PDF file within the last few weeks....The highest three articles downloaded from the site (lifetime statistics, not specifically November 2011) are all for resources that are not freely available as open access resources via any other (official) route....Leicester’s Gareth Johnson, current chair of the UK Council of Research Repositories, suggests that after publishing any paper academics ought to provide copies to their local archive (subject to copyright restrictions) and then alert colleagues to the existence of the work. Gareth calls this the ”Publish – Deposit – Share” model of academic publishing. There is no doubt that if you have gone to the trouble of carrying out research and/or developing a new resource, and then writing the relevant paper, then it seems logical to use whatever channels are at your disposal to you to alert interested parties to the existence of the work...."