In June 2023, DR-NTU reached a significant milestone – it hits 10 million downloads.

What does it mean?

DR-NTU aims to increase the visibility of NTU’s research. The download figures give a positive indication of the increased visibility. The downloads come from United States, Singapore, China, France, Germany, India, and many other countries, indicating the international reach of the repositories.

For under-represented work such as theses, DR-NTU becomes the primary source where readers can access, download and eventually cite the works. In 2023, there are about 20,000 higher degree theses which are made open access through DR-NTU. The theses attract close to 3 million downloads.

Do the downloads impact citation count?

Gargouri (2010) used data from four institutional repositories and demonstrated that article that are made open access through the repository are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year, that have not been made open access.

DR-NTU Collection Size and Download Count

 

So what’s next?

In 2021, Google Scholar launched an initiative to track how many of author’s publications should be free to read because of funder’s mandates or requirements (Noordeen, 2021). DR-NTU remains as a secure and reliable platform that allows NTU Community to make their publications open access and hence complying with funder’s requirements.
NTU Library as the custodian and curator of DR-NTU, shall continue to improve the platform, ensuring that NTU’s scholarly output is visible and discoverable. By end of 2023, we shall embark on a system upgrade, that aims to modernised the look and feel of DR-NTU – making it more user friendly and accessible.

 

References:

Gargouri Y, Hajjem C, Larivière V, Gingras Y, Carr L, et al. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PLOS ONE 5(10): e13636. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636

Noorden, R. (2020). Do you obey public-access mandates? Google Scholar is watching. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00873-8