Author of the Most Downloaded Publication
Open Access Week Spotlight - Monday, 19 October 2009
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Dr Katherine Forsyth from the Department of Celtic and Gaelic has been a supporter of Enlighten since its early days when it was known as the Glasgow ePrints Service. Keen to make her publications available to a worldwide audience Katherine initially approached the Enlighten team to enquire about the possibility of adding both books and articles to the repository. In particular she was keen to make available her book ‘Language in Pictland : the case against 'non-Indo-European Pictish’, which was out of print, but still of great interest to those involved in studying and researching the Picts. The publishers were happy for the book to be scanned and added to the Enlighten repository. After a very short period of time it was clear that the book was attracting a lot of interest, and since it was deposited in August 2005 it has been downloaded an amazing 50,000 times. To see the full text of Katherine’s book go to http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/2081/
Katherine said
‘My Language in Pictland was published by a small overseas publisher and was never easy to get hold of, but the original print-run sold out after a few years and I ended up having to photocopy it for people. When I heard about the University’s ePrints service I knew this was the solution to my problem, but never imagined there’d be such interest in the Picts. I am bemused, yet delighted, that Language in Pictland went straight to the ‘top of the chart’ and has stayed there! People all over the world have been able to read my work and in far greater numbers than would ever have been possible from the printed version alone. I notice it being cited more frequently since I deposited it and I’ve been contacted by readers from as far away as the Institute of Linguistics in Leningrad. We’ve also had an application from a post-graduate student from Beijing who learned of the department from reading my article on Enlighten.
I’ve found Enlighten indispensable in making material available to students. Very few Celtic Studies journals are available electronically, so I am always delighted to discover colleagues at this and other institutions have deposited material in repositories. Open Access has transformed the way I’m able to teach.’
Although not all material in Enlighten attracts quite the same levels of interest that Katherine’s book does, it is clear that making publications freely available does increase their visibility and impact. The top ten most popular publications in Enlighten have been downloaded more than 7,000 times.
The Department of Celtic and Gaelic have been supporters of Enlighten since the outset. Gilbert Márkus, a researcher on the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Expansion and Contraction of Gaelic in Medieval Scotland: the onomastic evidence’ was instrumental in getting Edinburgh University Press to develop an open access policy permitting deposit of articles from their journals in repositories such as Enlighten.
Dr Forsyth receiving a bottle of Champagne from Susan Ashworth, the Library's Assistant Director
(Research and Learning Support Services) in recognition of her Open Access Work
