Since April 2004 the initiative Digital Peer Publishing NRW (DiPP) is supporting scholarly communication and publishing in the internet,  particularly in strengthening and extending eJournals. Technological, legal and organizational frameworks and tools are developed and  provided by the hbz. Started with two existing eJournals "Zeitenblicke" and "Forum for Rapid Technology" and six start-ups in 2004, 2005 brought the existing eJournal "Social Work and Society" and new eJournals. The partners develop and establish novel forms of publishing, not represented in traditional publishing, by representing novel interdisciplinary research disciplines or incorporating new medial forms of presentation and quality assurance.

Strong usage -- Open Access

Already the first completed year brought more than 110.000 hits pointed to articles (overall more than 700.000 pages, 6 Mio. Hits) -- showing an increasing tendency. These numbers correspond well to the per-year usage of hundreds of thousands of electronic articles that are provided at a complete university (see e.g. Montgomery & King, 2002). This suggests to attribute this success to the 'Open Access' approach, the principle of providing scholarly articles freely accessible in the internet to anyone from anywhere.

Fig. 1: Usage statistics in 2005. Top: Sums and averages. Bottom: Time courses.

Methods

• Data were collected with AWSTATS: Automatic hits and requests (Robots, Crawlers etc.) were excluded.

• Overall number of articles published were 183 since December 2004. 102 were published over the DiPP platform with URN in the OAI repository. These articles were analysed for article based statistics (others were published before completed migration).

• The analysis is  based on months. The overall number of analysed months is reduced from theoretically 120 to 108 due to running migrations (in case of article based statistics to 99).

• Article views are hits of html sourcefiles only. Hits within articles (PDFs, links, supplementary materials etc.) were not counted. PDFs could not be analysed representatively, since not all analysed eJournals offer PDFs.

• Means and variance are shown as insets (top).

• Values of "Zeitenblicke" are set to the value of December (conservative assumption, no comparable data before)

• Vaolues of Soc.Work collected with WEBALIZER (partly computed on by-day basis). For article based statistics were computed from visitors (one article view per visitor, conservative assumption with respect to the mode computed for other journals).

• Fluctuations in the time courses are due to coincidences of publication dates of eJournal issues.

• Solid lines in the time courses were computed with a model (regression with power function - Visits: y = 9414 · x ^0,38; R² = 0,95, Article views: y = 3221 · x ^0,58; R² = 0,88, Hits: y = 347336 · x ^0,2; R² = 0,71)