Dr Melissa Terras: open access and the Twitter effect « Open Access Success Stories

"Dr Terras is a reader in electronic communication in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and co-director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. UCL has a progressive open access policy, requiring a copy of all research outputs to be deposited in its institutional repository, UCL Discovery. In October 2011 Dr Terras decided to blog about each of her refereed papers – how the research came about, what the outcomes were, and link to the full text of the papers themselves – as she deposited them. She soon discovered an interesting effect, demonstrated by one paper in particular. Her 2009 paper, Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation (Literary and Linguistic Computing, 25 (4) 425 – 438) had been downloaded twice since she deposited it in UCL Discovery. She then blogged and tweeted about it and almost immediately saw the number of downloads rise to 140. In a blog post a few weeks later she notes that “All in all, it’s been downloaded 535 times since it went live, from all over the world: USA (163), UK (107), Germany (14), Australia (10), Canada (10), and the long tail of beyond: Belgium, France, Ireland Netherlands, Japan, Spain, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Mexico, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Europe, UAE, ‘unknown’.” Three weeks later and, as a result of that further blog post, downloads passed the 800 mark. By April 2012 it had been downloaded over a thousand times, and by Open Access Week 2012 it has been downloaded 1212 times. It was the 16th most downloaded paper from UCL’s repository in the final quarter of 2011, and the third most downloaded paper in UCL’s arts faculty in the past year. While the paper is freely accessible from the UCL’s repository, it is also available behind a paywall in the closed access journal in which it was first published – Literary and Linguistic Computing. It’s popular there too – it’s the top download, in fact. But was does that mean with closed access? A grand total of 376 full text downloads in 2011 ..."