The other day we started talking about joining arXiv.org as a way to help support Open Access and the valuable service that arXiv offers. As you’d expect, the question arose, “How often do we think it’s being used?”
One exploratory email to support at arxiv.org and I had an answer almost within the hour. For accesses from the gmu.edu domain (meaning the user was on the campus network) we see this activity:
Year Downloads
2009 2,623
2010 3,867
2011 4,034
2012 4,975
2013 5,821
2014 8,351
2015 8,587
2016 10,480
A steady increase. Graphed, it’s easy to see. I’m going to guess that the jump in use around 2013 coincides with our rollout of the Primo discovery service (metadata for arXiv documents is included in the underlying database).
When you consider that we also have users who visit arXiv from off-network devices, it’s an easy decision for us–we are joining arXiv. Membership fee works out to about 14 cents per download (orders of magnitude better than what we see with Elsevier).