Promoting content discovery of open repositories: reviewing the impact of optimisation techniques (2016-2019)

Ensuring repositories fulfill the discovery needs of both human and machine users is of growing importance and is essential to validate the continued relevance of repositories to users, and as nodes within open scholarly communication infrastructure. Following positive results reported elsewhere [1, 2], this submission reviews the longer term impact of discovery optimization approaches deployed on an open institutional repository. These approaches were designed to support improved content discovery and user engagement, thereby improving content usage. Using Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde repository, as a case study, this submission will review the techniques and technical changes deployed on Strathprints and examine the impact of these changes by studying data on web impact, COUNTER usage and web traffic data over a 4-year period. Analysis of this unique dataset provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to the technical configuration of a repository can generate substantial improvements in its content discovery potential and ergo its content usage, especially over several years. Owing to the continued pressure on institutions to demonstrate the superior efficacy of their repositories in light of challenges from competing proprietary platforms, it is concluded that open repositories should be seeking to prioritise the implementation of the approaches piloted on Strathprints