The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot aff ord. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the effi cacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the effi cacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We fi nd that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing.

PurposeIn an educational world with increasing internationalization, digitization, assessment and financial justification, US institutions, especially academic libraries, must justify each new project. Institutional Repositories (IRs) are no exception. The authors attempt to identify factors that might affect the international usage of US IRs as part of assessment efforts to determine an IR's return‐on‐investment.Design/methodology/approachA survey was disseminated to IR administrators asking for demographic information, international usage counts for website hits and downloads, and any internationalization efforts connected to the IR in order to determine any influencing factors on an IR's international usage.FindingsWhile many IRs reported various rates of international usage, the largest group of respondents did not report an international usage rate for both page hits and downloads, despite overwhelmingly expressing an importance of international traffic to their IR and parent institution.Research limitations/implicationsIt is not clear if this non‐reporting of international usage could be due to ignorance, apathy, or lack of technological support on the part of the IR administrators.Practical implicationsDetermining international usage as a part of an IR assessment might be problematic or even impossible for many US IRs.Originality/valueThis study suggests that many IR administrators either do not know, do not care, and/or cannot record international usage data for their respective IRs, which could hinder determining an international return‐on‐investment for the IR.

INTRODUCTION Although librarians initially hoped institutional repositories (IRs) would grow through researcher self-archiving, practice shows that growth is much more likely through library-directed deposit. Libraries must then find efficient ways to ingest material into their IR to ensure growth and relevance. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM Valparaiso University developed and implemented a workflow that was semiautomated to help cut down on the time needed to ingest articles into its IR, ValpoScholar. The workflow, which continues to be refined, makes use of practices and ideas used by other repositories to more efficiently collect metadata for items and upload them to the repository. NEXT STEPS The article discusses the pros and cons of this workflow and areas of ingesting that still need to be addressed, including adding full-text items, checking copyright policies, managing student staffing, and dealing with hurdles created by the repository’s software.

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The open access (OA) movement seeks to ensure that scholarly knowledge is available to anyone with internet access, but being available for free online is of little use if people cannot find open versions. A handful of tools have become available in recent years to help address this problem by searching for an open version of a document whenever a user hits a paywall. This project set out to study how effective four of these tools are when compared to each other and to Google Scholar, which has long been a source of finding OA versions. To do this, the project used Open Access Button, Unpaywall, Lazy Scholar, and Kopernio to search for open versions of 1,000 articles. Results show none of the tools found as many successful hits as Google Scholar, but two of the tools did register unique successful hits, indicating a benefit to incorporating them in searches for OA versions. Some of the tools also include additional features that can further benefit users in their search for accessible scholarly knowledge.