Analysing deposit activity

Activity graphs

The activity graphs show the number of records deposited in a repository each day (bars) along with the cumulative total (green line). ROAR uses the OAI-PMH to harvest records from repositories, hence these are metadata records and do not necessarily represent open-access full-texts.

The cumulative total is plotted as a green line. The scale for the cumulative line is shown on the left-hand axis and is linear. The records deposited on each day are shown as vertical bars. The bars are shaded from blue (the day with the least number of deposits) to red (the day with the most number of deposits). The scale for the bars is shown on the right-hand axis and is logarithmic.

To make comparing repositories easier the axis are scaled to the nearest factor of 10 (so a repository with 375 records will be on a scale from 0 to 1000).

Ordering lists by activity

Each repository has three activity metrics that can be sorted on. These correspond respectively to the number of days in the previous twelve months on which more than 1, 10 or 100 deposits were made. E.g. if a repository received one deposit on Mondays, 10 on Tuesdays and 100 on Wednesdays it would have activity scores of 156, 104 and 52 respectively.

The intention of the activity metrics is to indicate how active a repository is. The absolute size of a repository may be largely due to bulk imports of historical data or volumes of non-written or non-scholarly material. We judge the success of an institutional repository to be how much support it has gained from the institution's faculty i.e. whether faculty are regularly using the repository to make their work open access (or, at least using it to make a record of their publications).

While OAI metadata records are still only a proxy measure of open access (they may not contain a full-text), the activity data provided here provides a greater insight into how successful repositories are.

Missing data

If no graph is shown there are no data available from Celestial to render a graph. Celestial is an OAI-PMH harvester that periodically downloads new records from repositories registered in it. The list of repositories registered in Celestial is separate from the list in ROAR - this is mostly due to historical factors, but also due to the greater demands placed on it than ROAR.

The most likely cause for a repository not being in Celestial is it not having a working OAI-PMH interface that is also registered in ROAR. New entries in ROAR will have a certain amount of delay before appearing in Celestial and later harvested, hence having a graph appear in ROAR.