Happy 7th birthday, CentAUR!

Today CentAUR, our open access institutional repository, lists over 37,000 research outputs, and has had over one millions downloads since opening at the end of January 2010. Here are some of CentAUR’s key milestones.

Downloads from CentAUR as measured by IRstats2.

2010

• Researchers are automatically registered on CentAUR to begin adding publications.
• Publications lists on School and personal profile pages are generated from CentAUR. This means that researchers don’t need to maintain separate lists anymore.

2011

•  The ‘Request a copy from Reading author’ button is enabled. Authors can choose to share their publications ahead of embargo expiry dates. In January 2017 the button was used 28 times.

2012

CentAUR statistics

• CentAUR joins IRUS-UK. We can now view and analyse CentAUR downloads and also benchmark these against other repositories. We use IRUS and IRStats for the monthly infographics published in this blog, Opening Research at Reading Blog (ORRB)

2013

• CentAUR features in the University’s half day conference on open access in June 2013. Four years on, open access is just one aspect of our upcoming ‘Open in Practice’ conference for academic and research students on 30th March 2017. Don’t forget to register!

2014

• The HEFCE policy for open access in the next REF is introduced by the University ahead of the 1st April 2016 deadline. The deposit of full texts increases to the extent that in January 2017 75% of all items deposited that month included a full text.

2015

• We begin to add University of Reading e-theses to CentAUR and EThOS harvests them. Did you know that our theses are some of the most downloaded items in CentAUR?
• CentAUR links up with the newly established University of Reading Research Data Archive. Upload your research data into the Archive and link it to your relevant publication in CentAUR!

2016

• The policy for open access in the REF began 1st April 2016. Don’t forget to add your author final versions of articles and conference items to CentAUR as soon as accepted for publication!

• CentAUR is harvested by Altmetric Explorer so that we can identify social media attention around Reading’s research publications. In the last week of January 2017, Altmetric identified 573 new posts about our research publications comprising: 28 news stories; 9 blog posts; 499 tweets; 24 Facebook posts; 5 Wikipedia pages; 6 Google+ posts; 2 videos

• CentAUR is one of the earliest adopters of the Publications Router service, which delivers records from a growing number of publishers directly to repositories, including CentAUR. With significant engagement from publishers the Router could source and deposit most of CentAUR’s article content.

2017

• CentAUR starts to tweet about CentAUR! – giving service information, promoting open access, highlighting new research papers added to the repository and our high download and Altmetric scores. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!