Evaluating the Impact of the FWF-E-Book-Library Collection in the OAPEN Library: An Analysis of the 2014 Download Data

The FWF-E-Book-Library is the Open Access repository for all stand-alone publications funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). This collection of e-books is also made available through the OAPEN Library. This paper analyses the usage of the FWF-E-book collection in the OAPEN Library during 2014, in order to measure scholarly impact and societal relevance in the humanities and social sciences. Every time a reader downloads a document, the Internet Protocol address of the provideran organisation through which the reader accesses the webis recorded. By combining the usage data and information about the provider, we can make an assumption about who is using a specific monograph. The influence of language is quite profound: books written in German are much more likely to be read within Germany, Austria or Switzerland, while books written in English have a far greater chance to be used all over the globe. Most of the usage is international; only 11% of the total downloads is national. The role of Germany and Switzerland is quite large, amounting to 42% of the total usage. The remaining 47% of the downloads originate from the rest of the world. The role of academic readers is relatively large, compared to governmental, business or non-profit usage. Yet, the biggest group of users have accessed the collection through an ISP. If the mean downloads per subject are analysed, we see large differences per subject: not all subjects enjoy the same amount of 'popularity'. It is clear that the collection has a wider reach than academics, and has been read not only in the German-speaking countries, but world-wide.