Analysis of visits to ScienceCentral, an open access full-text archive of scientific society journal literature

Abstract

ScienceCentral is a free or open access full-text archive of scientific society journal literature hosted by the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies. It was launched in December 2013. We analyzed the number of articles deposited, page views by period, country of visitors, number of visitors, and entry point of visits. Descriptive statistics were presented. We also hypothesized that visitors accessed ScienceCentral mostly through Google and Google Scholar since ScienceCentral allows Googlebot to index it. The number of deposited articles was 19,419 from 124 journals in December 2016. The number of page views per month was 20,228 in December 2016. The top countries of visitors were South Korea (39.9%), the United States (13.26%), India (4.2%), China (3.4%), and Russia (3.2%). The average number of page views per article a month in December 2016 was 1.0. Google and Google Scholar were powerful referral sites to ScienceCentral. Except for direct visits to ScienceCentral, seven out of the top ten access sites to ScienceCentral were Google or Google Scholar sites from a variety of countries. Although the number of visitors and page views has increased continuously, the average number of page views per article a month has not increased.

Keywords

• access to information
• archives
• bibliographic databases
• open access publishing