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.