Assessing the Scientific Relevance of Content in Open Access Repositories

Abstract

The results of monitoring 106 universities — participants of the Priority-2030 programme to determine the popularity and scientific significance of the content of domestic repositories are presented. Among them only 40 institutional repositories of universities were found, it was revealed that 20 of them are closed for a remote user. In 12 repositories, statistical information about the use of their content was found and the following indicators were searched and analyzed: number of views, downloads, citations, evaluations, mentions in social networks. It was found that domestic repositories do not use altmetrics services from commercial aggregators. Half of the repositories provide information on the number of views and downloads of internal repository counters. In six repositories, some information could be found through links to external sources where the full text of the publication is available: journal and conference websites, and scientometric databases. However, these sources, with the exception of publications in foreign periodicals, provide only internal statistics. The study of quantitative indicators of internal counters of repositories and scientometric databases gave uneven results.More complete data on the demand for some repository objects could be established on publications posted on the websites of foreign journals, since most of them use Altmetric or PlumX altmetric services that aggregate information from various sources. However, the quantitative indicators of this data show an inactive utilization of domestic publications abroad.The study reveals that altmetric metrics are poorly represented in repositories. Internal counters do not provide complete information on the demand for materials from institutional repositories, and altmetric services from commercial aggregators are hardly used. At the same time, the use of altmetric services PlumX and Altmetric provides more complete information for evaluating and adjusting the strategy of research promotion by universities.