10 million hits and growing!

ARAN downloads and page views have now surpassed 10 million, leaving no doubt that authors can reach a much wider audience and boost their citations by adding their publications to the institutional repository.

Since January this year 616,524 files have been downloaded from ARAN, 424 publications have been submitted to it by NUI Galway authors, including 81 PhD theses. The largest number of download hits in the past 6 months have come from Russia and the US. 

In 2019 the Irish Government outlined Ireland’s ambitions for open research in the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment (NORF, 2019) which includes 28 objectives. Progress and challenges are summarised in a recent landscape report. One of the challenges in relation to institutional repositories such as ARAN is ensuring that they meet evolving Open Access technical and metadata requirements. ARAN is OpenAIRE compliant meaning that funder and project information is captured in the required format for harvesting by OpenAIRE for the European Commission. Further technical work related to Plan S requirements is currently being completed. An Open Access Platforms Task and Finish Group has been formed to address current and projected infrastructure needs at NUI Galway in light of evolving national and international developments. 

Despite the local policy Open access to Research Outputs mandating deposit as well as ongoing advocacy and an easy upload process the number of submissions to ARAN could be much greater. It is easy to submit your publications to the repository. To do so go to your list of outputs in IRIS and click on the red book icon beside the publication you wish to upload and follow the prompts or email your publication to aran@nuigalway.ie and we'll upload it for you. 

The version required for ARAN is the final draft after peer review and editing has occurred but before publication. It is the copy without the publisher's typesetting, formatting, logos and pagination (also known as the post-print). We check and adhere to publisher's policies and explicitly promote and link to the published version. 

Further information and video tutorials are available in the Library Guide on Open Access Publishing or contact Trish Finnan at aran@nuigalway.ie 

Note: A download is when a user views and downloads a document. An item/page view is when a user visits the item's page, such as http://hdl.handle.net/10379/16819