Analyzing the Performance of an Institutional Scientific Repository – A Case Study

"From the Abstract: The Scientific Repository of the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco – Portugal (RCIPCB) was created in 2009 but its official presentation took place in January 2010. Its main purposes are promoting Open Access (OA), and preserving and disseminating the scientific knowledge produced at the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco (IPCB). Using DSpace as a technological platform, RCIPCB is an institutional project supported by the president of the IPCB. Therefore, the present study was developed with the aim of analyzing the performance of RCIPCB considering the evolution and growth in terms of users, archiving and self-archiving, the number of published documents (scientific) versus deposited documents in 2010 and the heterogeneity among communities/collections and its causes. The results show that RCIPCB indicates an asymmetric growing dynamics. Nevertheless, it reflects the institutional organization, in the sense that the communities related to the older schools possess more documents than the communities related to more recent schools. Communities having higher numbers of deposited documents seem to have also higher levels of searches and downloads. Therefore, it increases significantly the visibility of the institution and its researchers. Concerning the 2010 scientific production when compared with the deposit level of the corresponding community, the results show that the number of documents deposited is much lower than the number of published documents. Considering the results it is clear that RCIPCB needs to have a mandatory depositing policy that might also be extended to user registration. Those factors would minimize both the heterogeneity and the asymmetric growth of communities and collections. Moreover, it would also decrease the difference between scientific production and the corresponding deposit in RCIPCB." Posted by stevehit to pep.repositories pep.biblio oa.repositories oa.new on Wed Oct 03 2012