New Content in Digital Repositories

Abstract

Repositories collect a variety of statistics incorporating content coverage and item usage. These statistics are of value to a range of stakeholders, including researchers, institutions, funding bodies and repository managers. Repositories also play a role in the scholarly communication life cycle, as they disseminate and make discoverable scholarly outputs. In recent years, scholarly communication channels have undergone transformation. In addition to traditional channels centred on formal publication, such as journal articles, scholars are making increasing use of a range of social media to discuss, share and promote their ideas and outputs. Additionally, the range of scholarly output has expanded to include other products, such as research data and multimedia. In adapting to the changing research landscape, repositories need to incorporate a wider range of scholarly output. Stakeholders will benefit from a progression into the deployment of newer types of statistics, which reflect the broadening of scholarly communication channels. In this chapter, we provide an overview of repository statistics and efforts to standardise statistics relating to repositories and their software platforms. Altmetrics is discussed, and we explore the debates around purpose, scope and value in this fast-moving and emerging field.