Evaluating the Impact of the FWF-E-Book-Library Collection in the OAPEN Library: An Analysis of the 2014 Download Data

Abstract

The FWF-E-Book-Library is the Open Access repository for all stand-alone publications funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). This collection of e-books is also made available through the OAPEN Library. This paper analyses the usage of the FWF-E-book collection in the OAPEN Library during 2014, in order to measure scholarly impact and societal relevance in the humanities and social sciences. Every time a reader downloads a document, the Internet Protocol address of the provider�an organisation through which the reader accesses the web�is recorded. By combining the usage data and information about the provider, we can make an assumption about who is using a specific monograph. The influence of language is quite profound: books written in German are much more likely to be read within Germany, Austria or Switzerland, while books written in English have a far greater chance to be used all over the globe. Most of the usage is international; only 11% of the total downloads is national. The role of Germany and Switzerland is quite large, amounting to 42% of the total usage. The remaining 47% of the downloads originate from the rest of the world. The role of academic readers is relatively large, compared to governmental, business or non-profit usage. Yet, the biggest group of users have accessed the collection through an ISP. If the mean downloads per subject are analysed, we see large differences per subject: not all subjects enjoy the same amount of 'popularity'. It is clear that the collection has a wider reach than academics, and has been read not only in the German-speaking countries, but world-wide.