The Open Access Landscape of Institutional Repositories : A bibliometric analysis of Lund University Publications

Abstract: This master’s thesis is a bibliometric study of the institutional repository Lund University Publishing. The study aims to investigate the role of institutional repositories in open access publishing and to examine institutional repositories’ potential in describing research impact through the download statistics they provide for their open access material. The Swedish Research Council’s recent report on research evaluation in Sweden and the planned development of the SwePub national research database are impetus for a closer evaluation of institutional repositories in Sweden. Although related research has approached these topics before, the current thesis will do so uniquely by combining metadata and usage data from an institutional repository with citation analysis from Web of Science to better understand the role of institutional repositories in making research output available open access. The research output data of three faculties at the large, multidisciplinary higher education institution Lund University were examined for the study. The results of the bibliometric analysis showed a trend of increased proportions of publications available open access in the institutional repository from 2008 to 2012. There were however differences between the faculties, with the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Engineering showing a marked increase in open access content while the Faculties of the Humanities and Theology showed no increase. No substantial correlation was found between downloads and citations, suggesting that downloads represent a unique indicator of open access research impact, potentially reflecting use of scholarly material by a user group other than researcher colleagues. Further studies will however be needed to investigate the meaning of usage data in the form of download statistics.