20 million downloads from UCL’s institutional repository

April 2019 has proved to be a highlight in UCL’s progress in the area of Open Research (Open Science). This is a new global agenda, which aims to open up research and educational outputs to a wide audience by making them Open Access at point of use. Open Research (Open Science) also aims to change the way such outputs are evaluated and the reward system by which academics receive recognition. 

UCL Discovery is UCL’s institutional repository. UCL Publications Board and the Open Access Team is delighted to announce that UCL Discovery reached the milestone of 20 million downloads on 5 April 2019. Our 20 millionth download was of a dataset: Aldridge, R; (2019) Causes of death among homeless people: a population-based cross-sectional study of linked hospitalisation and mortality data in England. [Dataset]. Wellcome Open: London, UK, which supports an article on causes of death among homeless people in Wellcome Open Research, a platform that allows rapid publication and transparent peer-review. This demonstrates the combined value of open research data, open peer review and open access to research publications. 

The article’s corresponding author, Dr Robert Aldridge, deposited the dataset in UCL Discovery at the end of February 2019. Dr Aldridge is a Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Health Informatics. He uses data and digital technologies to investigate and improve the health of the public, with a particular focus on the burden of disease marginalised communities. The article and accompanying dataset, analysing the causes of death of homeless people across England and concluding that almost a third of them were due to treatable illnesses, rather than hypothermia or alcohol and drug overdoses, typifies this line of research. See UCL News for more information about the article.  

UCL authors currently deposit around 1,700 outputs in UCL Discovery every month. UCL is committed to supporting researchers with making research data open access, and is currently piloting a new Research Data Repository.