Abstract
To evaluate how the deposition of journal articles in Institutional Repositories (IRs) affects the number of citations and e-journal usage, we placed some articles published in Zoological Science in two Japanese IRs and collected their usage data in IRs and e-journals, as well as with the number of resulting citations. The experiment was started in 2008 and we compared the number of e-journal usage and citations of articles deposited in IRs before and after the experiment with those were not. In addition, we analyzed users' behaviour in IRs and compared user groups in IRs with those in e-journals based on users' IP addresses. The results revealed that deposition in IRs did not reduce e-journal usage. Moreover, whereas the journals gained new readers, this did not have an effect on the number of citations because most of new readers may be not researchers in Zoology but those in other fields or lay people.
