AEIOU – increasing the visibility of academic research in Wales

We are pleased to announce that the WRN consortium has been successful in their bid for further JISC funding.

The AEIOU (Activity data to Enhance and Increase Open-access Usage) Wales project will run for six months and starts this week. 

Project Summary
The AEIOU Wales project will provide a cost-effective and sustainable shared national service based on open standards that will benefit Welsh HEI partners by improving the quality, impact and productivity of their academic research.

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that the majority of user traffic into an institutional repository is generated through hits from Web search engines such as Google. Searchers will be directed towards a single item or record having no additional incentive to look for further relevant information within the repository.

The purpose of the proposed AEIOU Wales project is to increase the visibility and usage of all academic research by aggregating Welsh institutional repository activity data to provide a “Frequently viewed together” recommendation service, such as those used by Amazon and many other e-commerce websites.

The project will utilise existing relationships and build on the national repository infrastructure established through the WRN.

The project will create a shared recommendation service by aggregating activity data from each WRN repository. Searchers accessing an item within an institutional repository will be presented with recommendations to further Welsh research outputs and will be directed to those items via a Welsh Research Gateway. The recommendation service will also promote relationships between cross-institutional, collaborative research groups within Wales.