New journal hosting service for St Andrews

The University of St Andrews Library has just launched a new service to support academic staff and students at the University wishing to run their own online journal. The journal hosting service uses OJS (Open Journal Systems) to support the publishing process. OJS provides extensive functionality to help with editorial workflows and is an excellent platform for long-term online access to journal content.

The service is run by our Repository team and complements the opportunities for scholarly communication and open access offered by the Research@StAndrews:FullText platform.

Following a pilot phase, we are delighted that 3 journals are now live on our OJS platform.

Ethnographic Encounters is a platform for the work of the University of St Andrews undergraduate Social Anthropology students. The brand new e-journal presents a valuable resource for future students to draw on the experience and insights of their predecessors, and offers a means for Social Anthropology students throughout the world to engage with their peers in St Andrews.


Journal of Terrorism Research, published by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence began in 2010 and has been relaunched using OJS. The aim of this Journal is to provide a space for academics and counter-terrorism professionals to publish work focused on the study of terrorism.

Theology in Scotland has existed in print since 1994, and for the first time is making back issues available through the journal hosting service. The journal  publishes articles and book reviews from authors from across the theological spectrum, and particularly welcomes submissions which focus on aspects of Scottish theology. To date, these have included: studies of the work of prominent Scottish theologians; responses to current issues in the Scottish church and nation; and aspects of Scottish church history.

These journals show the flexibility of the service which allows some or all of the content to be made available open access, supporting existing publications or providing opportunities for new projects.

For more information, see our Library web pages or email journal-hosting@st-andrews.ac.uk

Latest landmark for Research@StAndrews:FullText

This week we have reached another landmark, with 1500 items in Research@StAndrews:FullText. Only 9 months ago we celebrated the 1000th deposit, after the repository had been in existence for 5 years.















The sharp increase has been helped by one of our special projects to create an archive for Sustainable Development Commission reports, as well as deposits coming in from our Research Information System PURE.

Our newly implemented statistics have also revealed a huge increase in usage, with 8653 visits in February 2012 (compared to 2054 in Feb 2011) and 3623 downloads (double those of any previous month). One of the most downloaded item was the recently added ebook Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the coming of the French Wars of Religion.


It hopefully won't be long until we celebrate the 2000th item, and perhaps 10,000 visits in a month!...

St Andrews supports e-theses online service

We are very encouraged by the recent news from EThOS, highlighting positive comments about the availability of UK PhD theses for a global audience.

EThOS is a British Library national UK service for delivering electronic theses. Almost all UK universities participate in EThOS. St Andrews is part of this broad membership and contributes content regularly. At the end of 2011 there were 642 records of St Andrews e-theses in EThOS, of which 349 have full text available for immediate download.


EThOS provides an excellent showcase for our research and great visibility for our researchers, with 50,000 users registered with the service. Demand is researcher-driven and the request process means that theses only need to be digitized once for further reuse. EThOS reports over 4000 new e-theses being added in the second half of 2011, and around 10,000 downloads every month. Visibility will be further improved with plans to open up the metadata held in EThOS for use by discovery services.

Statistics for St Andrews e-theses show the 'long tail' effect, with usage reported on e-theses dating back to the 1950s, eg Augier, F. 1954. Crown colony government in Jamaica (4 downloads in 2011).

It is interesting to see the subject coverage, with the majority becoming available due to researcher requests. Divinity and Scottish History are well represented, for example:

Gombis, T.G. 2005. The Triumph of God in Christ: Divine Warfare in the Argument of Ephesians (18 downloads)
Hall, B.E. 1971. The Earls of Orkney-Caithness and their relations with Norway and Scotland, 1158-1470 (8 downloads)
Boardman, S.I. 1989 Politics and the feud in late mediaeval Scotland (4 downloads) Also available from Research@StAndrews:FullText

Usage data also reflects specific projects such as Digital Islam which brought over 900 Islamic Studies theses to EThOS. You can narrow your search to find the 47 Digi-Islam theses from St Andrews, for example

Bakar, M.D. 1993. Conflict of law and the Methodology of Tarjih: A study in Islamic legal theory (20 downloads)
O'Sullivan, S. 2002. Early Umayyad Syria: A study of its origins and early development (10 downloads)

St Andrews is an Open Access sponsor of EThOS, showing our financial support and commitment to the service.

St Andrews open access membership with Royal Society

We are happy to announce that the University of St Andrews Library has arranged for Open Access Membership with Royal Society Publishing. This means that if you are a researcher at St Andrews and have an article accepted for publication in any of the Royal Society’s journals, you will qualify for a 25% discount on article processing charges if you choose ‘Open Choice’.

With Open Choice you can benefit from enhanced visibility for your article and the potential for increased citation, in addition to the recognised high quality of Royal Society journals. You will retain 100% copyright, with immediate open access under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 3.0) licence. Open access articles by St Andrews authors will be highlighted on a dedicated page on the Royal Society Publishing website.

This new membership is part of the Library’s varied activities that support open access to research, and followed consultation with a number of our researchers who already publish in Royal Society journals. Other activities include advice on compliance with funders’ open access mandates and help with depositing full text in our repository Research@StAndrews:FullText via PURE

Further information for St Andrews researchers is available from Jackie Proven in the University Library

NEW: Public stats now available for Research@StAndrews:FullText

We are delighted that we are now able to show usage statistics for content in our institutional repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText. Thanks to the services provided by the Scottish Digital Library Consortium (SDLC), we now have 'page views' and 'downloads' from Google Analytics integrated into our DSpace platform and publicly available.

Visitors to the repository can see statistics for individual items:

Statistics initially show how many times the metadata for an item has been viewed, and from the 'View Statistics' button users can see a breakdown by date range, plus the number of times the full text has been downloaded.

Visitors can also view the 'Top items' for a particular Collection:

with live links from the list of items to the most viewed item in that Collection.

To improve usability, links to the full text files have been moved to a more accessible position on the page, immediately above the Title.

Additional work has also been done to help capture more downloads that have been discovered via Google, and our overall statistics are already showing how we have recorded this traffic.

New project and flexible policy boosts repository content

The start of 2012 has seen more content added to Research@StAndrews: FullText than in any previous month. Much of this activity is down to a new project under way to create an archive for the Sustainable Development Commission.

The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), which closed on 31 March 2011, was the UK Government's independent adviser on sustainable development. Work on this project was undertaken by St Andrews Sustainability Institute (SASI). Our repository will provide a permanent home to this collection of reports.

Research publications and theses continue to be added to our collections, and our full text content now stands at 1355 items.

Our flexible content policy means that we can accommodate a range of material including staff research outputs deposited via PURE, PhD theses deposited directly by students, community collections such as the SDC reports or CREEM Technical Reports, and most recently our University Library annual report 2010-2011.

We had a record number of visits to Research@StAndrews:FullText in January, up almost 50% compared with January 2011. The most viewed items were:

Retrospective power analysis [Article]
The economics of trade secrets : evidence from the Economic Espionage Act [Thesis]
The soft-focus lens and Anglo-American pictorialism [Thesis]
What is social learning? [Article]
Karl Barth's academic lectures on Ephesians (Göttingen, 1921-1922) [Thesis]
An update to the methods in Endangered Species Research 2011 paper "Estimating North Pacific right whale Eubalaena japonica density using passive acoustic cue counting" [Report]
The consequences of Israel's counter terrorism policy [Thesis]
Health Behaviour in School-aged Children : World Health Organization collaborative cross-national study (HBSC): findings from the 2010 HBSC survey in Scotland [Report]
Sustainable development : third annual assessment of progress by the Scottish Government [Report]
Saint Peter and Paul Church (Sinan Pasha Mosque), Famagusta: a forgotten Gothic moment in Northern Cyprus. [Article]