JTRP celebrates milestone of one million downloads

JTRP technical reports are from research projects conducted through collaboration with the Indiana Department of Transportation, higher education institutions, and industry. The JTRP program adopted an electronic publication process in 2011. Bepress, a third-party vendor, provides the digital platform that supports all Purdue Press and Libraries serial publications as well as Purdue e-Pubs. Before the repository was established, reports were printed and then shelved without easy access or impact.

“The impact of this electronic migration has been nothing short of amazing,” said Darcy Bullock, JTRP director. “This has been an incredibly valuable tool for communicating to our sponsors the impact their funded research is having.” Just this past fall, both Ohio DOT and Illinois DOT asked JTRP and Purdue Libraries to host a campus visit to learn about our unique partnership.

The one millionth download was “Cost- and Energy-Efficient (LED, Induction and Plasma) Roadway Lighting,” written by Shuo Li and Aaron Thompson of INDOT, and Purdue Professor Yi Jian, with graduate students Bowen Guan and Guangyuan Zhao. This report was published on Purdue e-Pubs in 2013 and has 248 total downloads to date. Kicking off the next million downloads was “Simplified Load Distribution Factor for Use in LRFD Design,” by Purdue Professors Elisa Sotelino and Judy Liu, with graduate students Wonseok Chung and Kitjapat Phuvoravan. This report was published in 2006 and has 11,744 total downloads to date. Currently, more than 1,500 technical reports dating back to the 1950s reside in the JTRP Technical Report Repository on Purdue e-Pubs. These reports average over 1,000 downloads per day.

In addition to providing free electronic access, hard copies of recent technical reports can be purchased through the Purdue e-Pubs site. Some publications, such as the Indiana Mobility Reports, are also available on Amazon. New for 2014, JTRP technical reports are available as free e-books for download onto personal e-readers.

In 2012, Interim President Timothy Sands recognized JTRP’s open access initiative by presenting Darcy Bullock with the 2012 Faculty Award for Leadership in Open Access. This award was given in recognition of his commitment to broadening the reach of scholarship by making publicly funded research freely accessible online in collaboration with Purdue Libraries. During the same year, one of the JTRP reports written by Professor Emeritus Sidney Diamond was recognized as the three millionth download from Purdue e-Pubs as a whole. Other notable JTRP alumni with technical reports in the Purdue e-Pubs collection include Delon Hampton and Essam Abdel-Aziz Sharaf, former prime minister of Egypt.

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