Where to find our open access books and journals
UCL Press proudly partners with the following services to deliver quality open access books and journals:
Our books are also freely available via Google Books and Google Play.
All UCL Press books and journals are also preserved using Portico.
Our download data
In recent months, UCL Press has seen a sharp increase in AI bot traffic on some of its platforms. The key measure to protect platforms from large volumes of AI bot traffic is to implement third-party systems such as Cloudflare that block AI bots from crawling content platforms and repositories. See table below for details of the platforms where our content is shared and the systems they have in place to protect from AI bots.
Our historical and future download data is likely to be affected by AI bots, although it is impossible to say with any degree of accuracy the extent to which this is the case.
In line with UCL Press’s ethos and mission, we will continue to share our content with a wide range of platforms, regardless of whether or not they have protections in place, in order to ensure that it is available to the widest possible audience around the world and we will continue to share the download and access statistics as reported to us by the various platforms we work with.
How we collect our books readership data
The statistics that we collect come from a variety of sources, each of which collects and reports upon data in a different way.
The table below shows the data that we collect from each platform, which we then collate and display on our statistics pages, which are updated monthly.
| Platform | Measure | Country/Territory information provided? | How often is this data updated? | Counter-Compliant? | AI bot protection status |
| UCL Discovery | Book downloads | Yes | Daily | Yes | In progress (Cloudflare) |
| www.ucldigitalpress.co.uk | Book visits | Yes | Daily | No | No |
| JSTOR | Chapter downloads | Yes | Monthly | Yes | Internal monitoring |
| OAPEN | Book downloads | Yes | Monthly | Yes | Yes (Cloudflare) |
| Google Books | Book views (2+pages) | No | Monthly | No | Unknown |
| Google Play | Book downloads | Yes | Monthly | No | Unknown |
| Janeway | Article downloads | Yes | Yes (Anubis) |
Statement on COUNTER compliance
UCL Press distributes its open access books to a number of global content platforms, in order to ensure widespread access to the content we publish. Some of the platforms we work with are COUNTER compliant, but not all. COUNTER is a community-led organisation that provides a global standard for measuring and reporting content usage through normalised metrics. For now, UCL Press will continue to distribute its books to non-COUNTER compliant platforms as this supports our ethos to make our books as widely available as possible to both academic and non-academic audiences. We are working with the open access publishing community to lobby distribution platforms to adopt COUNTER in order to ensure that usage data is reported as consistently as possible.
More information on COUNTER can be found here: