Do LiveCoMS articles make a mark?

At LiveCoMS, we make an effort to produce articles of lasting value to the community. Our community-run, fully open access model also means we have direct access to key performance metrics for LiveCoMS papers, so we wanted to share some of these to help answer whether our articles are making a difference.

Statistics from the web page show that we typically have a few thousand article PDFs downloaded every month, and our top 10 articles each have well over 1000 PDF downloads in the last year. In the period of less than four years that we’ve been tracking data, our top articles have over 10,000 downloads each and our top 20 articles (out of about 30 published to date) are all over 1000 downloads each. 

The statistics are a testament to the value of our articles. The field of molecular modeling is relatively small, so in our eyes, seeing thousands of downloads of a given PDF means we’re reaching a significant fraction of the field.

We are not aware of what total download numbers look like for typical publishers and articles, so if anyone has access to these numbers for papers published in a more traditional venue, we would love to have that information to help us compare. Regardless, we’re excited to see LiveCoMS is having an impact and large numbers of people find our work valuable!

                LiveCoMS monthly PDF downloads from our current hosting site, where we moved in late 2021

            Some of our most highly viewed articles since late 2021, when we moved to our new hosting platform.