Thursday 5 January 2012

Mendeley Open Access Update

In the last six months since I analysed Mendeley's contribution to Computer Science OA in June 2011, they appear to have increased their membership of that community by 37% and the ratio of full text documents to community members has increased from 0.66 to 0.71. The number of OA documents has increased by 47% to 11,757 and the number of OA active users (i.e. users who have made at least one document public through Mendeley's servers) has risen by 46% to 2,441 but still represents only 15% of the total membership of that community.

Congratulations to Mendeley - their service is obviously rising in popularity and hence in significance to the community. OA analysts will note that the increase in open access documents comes from increased membership, rather than a change in behaviour of the community.



3 comments:

  1. Hi Les,

    I have a few questions that will help me understand the meaning of the Mendeley data:

    (1) The 70% ratio of OA full-text documents to members: is that 1 paper per member (per year)? (I assume it's the ratio to all members, not just "active" members?)

    (2) How is the discipline distribution? (Are these results mostly coming from some disciplines and not others?)

    It's hard to know how to interpret these results, from an OA point of view without a breakdown by year and discipline, expressed in terms of the ratio of OA papers to total papers for each year/discipline.

    Stevan

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  2. Hi! In your post you said "the number of OA active users has risen by 46% to 2,441 but still represents only 15% of the total membership of that community", which total membership community do you mean? Do you mean the entire Computer Science discipline of Mendeley? I calculated that if 15 % = 2441 then the community has a total of 16273 members. In your post "Mendeley: Download vs Upload Growth" it says there were 74736 members in the Computer Science discipline at that time. Could you clarify? Thanks!

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  3. Leslie, what are your opinions on The Research Works act, which has drawn the ire of the online open access community over the past few months?

    Michael

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