In July 2012, ORBi, the institutional repository of the University of Liège, has passed the benchmark of 50,000 references with full text, which represents close to 61% of the deposits!
A great success which rewards the audacious gamble launched 5 years ago by the University of Liege, supported by a strong institutional mandate. It is also a fine victory for the accessibility of research documentation, as close to 50% of these references are in open access.
According to the April 2012 Webometrics ranking, ORBi is now in 26th position worldwide amongst the institutional repositories as far as fulltexts are concerned (33rd in 2011) and, more generally, in 18th place amongst the European repositories (27th in 2011) and 39th out of 1435 on a world level (46th in 2011).
ORBi is thus meeting its fundamental objectives, established at the start of the project, in other words serving as an access point, window and memory for the University of Liege’s academic and research publications. Let us remind ourselves that this success is due to the work carried out by the members of the ULg as all the deposits placed in ORBi are encoded by the authors themselves or by one of their representatives.
- It is also to be noted that with over 5,000 deposits per year, ORBi ensures a more complete coverage of the ULg’s research work than that provided by commercial databases as far as grey literature is concerned but also, and this is more surprising, published research articles themselves (cf. L’Open Access en Belgique francophone).
- As far as visibility for the authors is concerned, the results have also met expectations:
- Over 1,000 downloads of integral texts per day since the beginning of 2011 (2,000 for the month of June 2012). These figures exclude downloads carried out by automatic search engines. In total, since ORBi has been up and running there have been over 860,000 downloads and 1,780,000 visualizations of the references.
- A study carried out in September 2011 on the Scopus database on the 2009 publications of the members of the ULg shows that the references deposited on ORBi are on average cited more than twice as many times as those which are not.
Open Access Belgium 