The cIRcle team is happy to announce the release of our 2020-2021 Impact and Activity Report!
2020-2021 was a year of unexpected challenges and new opportunities that highlighted the importance of open access to research. Early this Spring, cIRcle celebrated passing the 74,000 open access item mark and attracted nearly 1.5 million visits via the UBC Open Collections web portal. With more than 50% of all cIRcle deposits in 2020-2021 coming from faculty and post-graduate researchers, our fast-growing UBC Faculty Research and Publications collection is drawing visitors from around the world to the work of local experts.
Each year, our team focuses on developing new and continuing partnerships with the UBC community. In 2020-2021 more than 100 open access articles representing the crucial contributions of UBC scholars to novel coronavirus research were collected and archived as part of the cIRcle COVID-19 Research Content Recruitment Campaign. Support for Open Education Resources grew as entire open-licensed courses and materials found permanent homes in the repository. cIRcle also welcomed reports and articles created over the past fifteen years from the BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit (BCIRPU) and archived more than 200 images from the grant-funded project ‘Expertise, Labour, and Mobility in Nepal’s Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Construction, Finance, and Law as Domains of Social Transformation‘
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard to refine our systems and procedures with the goal of making UBC’s scholarly works more accessible. With Atmire, cIRcle implemented a batch import utility to efficiently deposit large batches of content. This tool has increased cIRcle capacity to accept high-volume grant-funded research projects and conference materials. This year cIRcle also initiated a name disambiguation project to review UBC faculty author names in item records that may appear in various forms on the works themselves. To date, the cIRcle team identified and modified hundreds of records, with many more modifications in the works.
Find all of this and more UBC research in cIRcle!