Each October, researchers and librarians across the globe celebrate Open Access Week, an international event encouraging and celebrating open practices in research and scholarship. Here at CUNY, we have so much to celebrate that Open Access Week lasts all month long. This year was no exception. CUNY Librarians put open in action, organizing workshops and events, tabling on their campuses, and initiating one-on-one conversations with faculty colleagues to let them know about CUNY Academic Works. As a result, there’s been an increase in faculty self-submissions, indicating a deeper and growing engagement with the repository. CUNY Academic Works grew by 111 new items, and received 36,976 new downloads (56% of which were international).

This month also saw an unprecedented download spike when Academic Works went from an average of 1,000 downloads per day to 5,309 downloads on October 11th and 3,110 downloads on October 12th. After investigating this anomaly, the Office of Library Services reached out to the technical team at bepress who confirmed these downloads were from individual users, not bots. If you’d like to learn more about the process for identifying and removing bots from CUNY Academic Works usage statistics, you may be interested in the recent bepress webinar, Bot Shields: Activate! Ensuring Reliable Repository Download Statistics. (Trust me – it’s well worth your time.)

The five most downloaded works in October include:

1. Improving Exploration And Exploitation Capability Of Harmony Search Algorithm
   Series: Publications and Research at City College of New York
2. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences
   Series: Publications and Research at John Jay College
3. Reframing School Dropout as a Public Health Issue
   Series: Master’s Theses at Hunter College
4. Folk Concepts
   Series: Publications and Research at Kingsborough Community College
5. An Analysis of the South China Sea Dispute: Focusing on the Assessment of the Impact of Possible Solutions on the Economies of the Region
   Series: Master’s Theses at City College of New York

The fourth most downloaded item, Folk Concepts, comes from Professor Jay Bernstein at Kingsborough Community College who passed away this summer. Jay was a fierce advocate for CUNY Academic Works and one of my closest colleagues and collaborators in this initiative. His absence is deeply felt—so I was very heartened to see Folk Concepts, originally published as a chapter in the $430 reference work 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook, receive so much attention this month. A large portion of these downloads come from Kenyatta University in Nairobi City, Kenya. It’s fun to imagine how this work is being used. I know Jay would’ve enjoyed this as well.