Infoscience by the numbers
Infoscience is the institutional archive (open archive) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a database that archives and advertizes the work and scientific publications produced by EPFL research groups. This database provides the records it contains a good visibility, improving the dissemination of the school publications: in 2011, more than 25,000 publications have been accessed every day.
The Infoscience[1] project aims to facilitate access to scientific resources produced at EPFL: publications, preprints, research reports, projects, theses, student work, courses, posters, etc.
Infoscience is meant to be a convenient tool for researchers: they can archive their scientific production, organize it, and then, re-use the content. For outsiders, Infoscience can be a platform to showcase EPFL skills for other researchers, students looking for a PhD position, etc.
The deposit of a publication on an open archive such as Infoscience has been shown to lead to a better visibility of research works [2], which is likely to increase citations [3].
Number of publications
As of today (May 2nd, 2012), Infoscience hosts more than 89,000 records. 28,700 of these (32.3%) also give access to the publication fulltext (open access).
Number of publications in infoscience
One of the Infoscience assets is to offer access to the gray litterature produced by the School: PhD and master theses, technical reports, etc. When the fulltext is available, Infoscience is generally the only and unique website offering free access to this information.
Distribution of publications by document type
Visitors
600,000 to 1,000,000 distinct visitors come to Infoscience every year. In 2011, these people, whom majority is only looking for PDF documents, downloaded more than 7 millionfulltexts.
Our visitors generally come from countries which have strong commitment to research. People working or studying at EPFL contribute to approximately 7% of the visits.