The IUPUI campus sits near the center of Indianapolis, the state capitol of Indiana. Along with one of the largest medical schools in the United States, three hospitals, and more than 140 health-related majors and degrees, IUPUI emphasizes service-learning, community-engaged research, and public scholarship. It makes sense, therefore, that when public health emergencies arrive, IUPUI will be at the center of the effort to make a difference for the people of Indiana.

In July 2020, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University released its latest ranking of university bibliometric indicators. The Leiden Rankings use new tools to characterize the bibliometric output of a university without relying on problematic, reputational proxies such as the Journal Impact Factor.

At IUPUI we work for Open Access every week of the year. So, when OA Week rolls around, it’s a good time to reflect on why we’re doing this and on the fruits of our labor.

Why We Work for Open

Are you stuck with a corporate publisher that doesn’t actually care about research? What if the whole editorial board quit?

That’s what happened at the Journal of Informetrics.

Have you heard about Pressbooks? Piloted by IU through the Unizin consortium, Pressbooks gives faculty and staff the freedom to create customized, free or low-cost online course materials for IUPUI students. Why would someone want to do that? Well …

In November, an article that I wrote with two of my colleagues was published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2169). The article reports some of the results of a wide-ranging survey of faculty attitudes regarding issues in scholarly communication.

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Brandon Board, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. [J.O.]

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Kacie Hardin, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. [J.O.]

Note: To mark OA Week 2017, we have invited Julie Burchfield, a graduate student in our Department of Library and Information Science, to share a recent analysis of benefits of the institutional repository to faculty authors. Julie also made a related infographic, available from: https://create.piktochart.com/output/25097275-open-access-scholarworks. [J.O.]

Last year I wrote a post comparing ResearchGate with our institutional repository for generating downloads of openly shared manuscripts. In short, the repository beat ResearchGate by 84% in download counts for the works that I have shared on both sites. If I want people to find and read my articles, I’m not wasting my time with ResearchGate.