Since its beta launch in January 2009, EThOS, the open access repository for UK theses, has become one of the British Library's most popular online resources.
Over the three months that it has been available as a beta version:
Over 100 UK universities have signed up to participate in the service;
Traffic to the site has grown to over 550,000 hits per month;
The number of theses available for immediate download has tripled, from 4,000 in January to over 12,500 at the end of April;
It has become the most popular linking destination from the British Library Integrated Catalogue, generating four times more links than the next most popular resource.
EThOS has quickly been adopted by the research community and is effectively showcasing UK research to the World. However, this popularity has created some service delays.
Demand has been twice British Library's expectation, resulting in a backlog of theses waiting to be digitised. The British Library has taken steps to minimise the backlog by introducing a second digitisation shift and investing in new scanning machinery.
Details on the size of the backlog at the end of April:
Number of theses waiting to be digitised: c10,000;
Average number of new requests for theses per day (as of 6/5/09): 100;
Digitisation capacity (theses per day): 175;
Forecast date for complete digitisation of theses in backlog: October 2009....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/14/2009 02:42:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
