Scholarly Communications

Posted on 16th June 2025

How often do you take Paracetamol?

Health is a right, not a privilege. In 2025, UEL’s Year of Health is tackling health inequalities, driving innovation, and investing in community-focused care. Together, we’re shaping a healthier, fairer future for all. One of the ways we’re doing that is through the University’s Institutional Repository where your research publications produced while at UEL are being deposited Open Access every day. An exciting case study highlights the repository’s benefits below.

How often do you take paracetamol? How much do you know about it? UEL’s Dr Samir Ayoub published a paper in 2021 that shook up our understanding of “one of the most widely used drugs worldwide”. Paracetamol (acetaminophen): A familiar drug with an unexplained mechanism of action, published Open Access via our respository, sheds light on the misunderstood drug, and debates the challenges and consequences of its over-the-counter access.

The article was deposited Open Access to UEL’s repository four years ago and has since garnered 530 views and has been downloaded almost 300 times across 25+ countries.

Though it’s exciting to see UEL outputs being downloaded by the hundreds, it can be difficult to measure how much real-world impact this has. Altmetric, the colourful “donut” you’ve probably seen next to articles online or in the UEL repository, is helping us cut through this problem. This alternative metric, as the name implies, collates citations, our traditional measurement of research impact, but also puts emphasis on other prominent means of media communication such as social media, Wikipedia, news outlets, policy documents and more.

Dr Ayoub’s article has an Altmetric score of 87 (see Figure 1). This score is made up of the following usage statistics, having been referenced or mentioned by:

• 6 news outlets
• 1 blog
• 32 X users
• 1 Facebook user
• 1 Wikipedia page
• 2 YouTube creators
• 88 Dimensions citations
• 733 Mendeley readers

Figure 1. Ayoub, S. S. 2021. Paracetamol (acetaminophen): A familiar drug with an unexplained mechanism of action – Altmetric Donut

Make your research Open Access

By making your research Open Access, you remove barriers to your outputs. This makes your work more accessible to all, to be utilised and expanded upon worldwide. Get in touch with us at repository@uel.ac.uk if you have any questions about the repository or Open Access. You can also learn more about making your work Open Access through our LibGuide.