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Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Advancing Purdue Scholarship and Expanding Open Access: Purdue e-Pubs Surpasses 8.0 Million Downloads

October 21st, 2014

This week marks the 8th annual Open Access Week. Open Access week is a week-long global opportunity for the academic community to learn about the benefits of open access. Open access is the free immediate online access to the results of scholarly research and analysis. With so many groundbreaking discoveries and research findings occurring at Purdue University, there is one place on campus providing free global online access to this scholarship — the Purdue e-Pubs institutional document repository.  Continuing on its steady record pace, Purdue e-Pubs recently surpassed 8.0 million downloads and 40,000 objects.

These 40,000 objects have been critical to Purdue e-Pubs’ mission, to serve Purdue’s campus community by providing free global online access to Purdue scholarship and research. To date, every college on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus has a presence in the repository. Purdue e-Pubs continues to be a central place on campus advancing the impact of scholarship at the global, national and local level. Purdue University Libraries began providing the Purdue e-Pubs service to the campus community in 2006 as a means to openly share research and scholarship in a stable, open, and citable format.

Measuring and reporting impact is an important part of the Purdue e-Pubs service model.  As well as having all content indexed in Google Scholar, Purdue e-Pubs uses Google Analytics to gather qualitative information. The repository also issues automatic monthly download notifications to authors, allowing authors the opportunity to demonstrate the reach of their scholarship, not only to academic colleagues and administrators, but to taxpayers, policymakers, and media outlets.

As the repository continues to garner more downloads and objects, faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to consider adding their research and scholarship.  For more information about Purdue e-Pubs and adding additional previously published items, please contact Dave Scherer, scholarly repository specialist, Purdue University Libraries at 765-494-8511 or dscherer@purdue.edu.