Celebrating 20 years of QUT ePrints

Guest post from Paula Callan, Scholarly Communications Librarian

October 23-29 is International Open Access Week and this year, QUT has an additional reason to celebrate.  This month will be the 20-year anniversary of QUT ePrints, the University’s very successful online showcase of research created by QUT staff and HDR students. When it launched in 2003, very few universities had anything similar. Thanks to the amazing foresight of then Deputy Vice Chancellor, Emeritus Professor Tom Cochrane, QUT ePrints had a huge advantage in the shape of a policy which required the deposit of certain types of research outputs.  While most universities now have similar open access policies, at the time, it was a world first.

Not only has QUT ePrints benefitted from high-level support (University Academic Board), the majority of QUT’s researchers enthusiastically embraced the concept of open access.  Consequently, QUT ePrints was regularly ranked in the top 20 in the world ranking of institutional repositories alongside institutions such as MIT and NASA (the ranking of repositories ceased in 2017).

In 20 years, the number of records has grown to over 131,000 and the number of full-text downloads now exceeds 38 million.  This represents a lot of extra eyeballs for QUT’s research outputs because the open access version is generally only downloaded when the publisher’s copy is behind a paywall. One of the most frequently downloaded articles in QUT ePrints is a paper by Professor Marilyn Campbell on cyberbullying which has been downloaded 111,714 times.  Four current QUT academics now have total download counts of more 250,000 including Professor Campbell, Professor Katherine White, Professor Axel Bruns and Professor Per Davidsson.

Happy birthday QUT ePrints. 🎂

For more information about QUT ePrints contact your Liaison Librarian or the Office for Scholarly Communication osc@qut.edu.au