Heriot-Watt University’s Theses Repository, ROS, has over 30,000 items and contains full-text copies of all Heriot-Watt University PhD theses awarded from 2009 onwards.

The top downloaded thesis was submitted in 2015, and has over 24,000 downloads:

Molwus, Jurbe Joseph (2014) ‘Stakeholder management in construction projects : a life cycle based framework‘, PhD thesis, Heriot-Watt University.

Stats on theses downloaded can be obtained from a service called IRUS-UK, which aggregates statistics from UK repositories.

The visualisation below shows downloads by country in September 2018.  With a large downloads of theses in the areas of construction and energy production, Heriot-Watt’s reputation as a global university with a strong engineering and technical focus is borne out by the usage of our research.  For more information, contact open.access@hw.ac.uk

Open Access Week is an international celebration of the benefits of Open Access to scholarship.  The theme this year “reflects a scholarly system in transition. While governments, funders, universities, publishers, and scholars are increasingly adopting open policies and practices, how these are actually implemented is still in flux. As open becomes the default, all stakeholders must be intentional about designing these new, open systems to ensure that they are inclusive, equitable, and truly serve the needs of a diverse global community.”

Although a recent major driver to open access is the requirement for the next REF, that accepted manuscripts should be deposited in an institutional repository (Pure) no more than three months after acceptance, examples of good open access practice can be found in many places:  depositing preprints in repositories such as arXiv;  creating and publishing Open Access journals, such as the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity (IPED) journal, published by the School of Social Sciences and using Open Journal Systems software; and creating and sharing open research data.

The Research Support Team in Information Services provides support to research staff and students on making their research more openly available.  We provide advice via webpages and Power Hours, and individual tailored advice. We can help you:

• maintain your research profile in Pure, including adding publications
• publish your research outputs as Open Access, to meet REF Open Access Compliance
• with advice on article processing charges (APCs) and open access requirements for all funders
• with research computing solutions
• manage your research data – data management planning, data storage and sharing
• publish open data, including obtaining dois for data
• copyright and licensing

Throughout this week, we will post on different aspects of open access: how to create unique identifiers (ORCID IDs, digital object identifiers (dois)), how to publish open data, meet REF Open Access compliance, and on digital theses.

We are keen to hear your experiences, questions and opinions on what open access means for you and your research.  There will be a competition with a prize!

The first resource we are sharing is the film Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. 

Get in touch

The Research Support team in IS is:

• Linda Kerr, Research Support Librarian
• Lesa Ng, Research Support Assistant (pictured)
• Marko Mlakar, Research Support Assistant (pictured)
• Jose Manuel Menendez Montes, Research Computing Manager

We can be reached on open.access@hw.ac.uk

For advice on Pure – purehelp@hw.ac.uk

For advice on open data –  openresearchdata@hw.ac.uk

@OpenResHWU

The Scopus database is available on a trial basis from the 4th of November – 3rd December 2013.

Scopus is one of the largest abstract and citation databases of peer-reviewed literature.  Produced by Elsevier, Scopus has over 19,000 titles from over 5,000 publishers worldwide and is a rival database to Web of Science.  Broadly speaking, compared to Web of Science, Scopus has greater international coverage, includes more unique journals of more recent provenance than Web of Science but includes lower impact journals. Scopus also only includes citation data from 1996.

We are interested in your feedback on which is your preferred database based on the current trial or past experience. As Elsevier also provide the software underlying the University’s Research Gateway, Pure, we are interested in exploring the option of subscribing to Scopus as well as or potentially instead of Web of Science.

The Scopus Information site is available on the web at http://info.scopus.com.  It contains a wealth of resources including:

• User guides and tips
• Title lists
• Quick tips and Frequently Asked Questions

Access to Scopus is restricted to the Heriot-Watt IP range.  If you need any assistance using Scopus, please contact your Subject Librarian.

A guided trial presented by representatives from Elsevier will be held on Friday 15th November at 10.30 am (Cameron Smail Library). If you would like to attend, please contact Linda Kerr.  Academic and research staff will be given priority.

For an in-depth comparison between Scopus and Web of Science, please see this recent paper