[Web4lib] Ranking Web of Repositories: January 2010 edition

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

The new edition of the Ranking Web of repositories 
(http://repositories.webometrics.info) has just been published. The 
records have been updated and now the Excel files (xls) are included in 
the calculation of the number of documents deposited.

We have included some suggestions regarding the role of librarians in 
the Open Access movement. Some of the current techniques are making 
difficult the use of the repositories for citing purposes, so end users 
(scientists, researchers, scholars)are not able to add and URL in their 
bibliographic references. We publicly acknowledge the work done by 
librarians worldwide but we would like to offer some suggestions to 
improve the impact of the OAI:

 -The institutional repository is a very important asset of the 
institution as a whole, not only of the library. We recommend the 
following syntax for the institutional repository web address:

http://repository.university.country/
and not
http://repository.library.university.country/

-Collective catalogues are well suited for library purposes, but 
although harvesters and consortium repositories may be very useful, they 
should be considered always as secondary systems, mainly for purposes of 
increasing visibility and searchability. Even for very small 
institutions it is feasible to set up their own repository that is, as 
mentioned before, the main research asset for the institution.

- Repositories consist of full text papers, not bibliographic records. 
That means that the link to the full text file should be clearly marked 
in the web page of each record. Some repository designs makes difficult 
to locate such links.

- For scientists it is important that the link to the full text would be 
easily citable. So it should be avoided the following situations:

      Very long URLs.
      URLs with nonsense characters that have no meaning. We suggest to 
use, for example, the last name of the first author and the publication 
year.
      File names without suffix indicating the type (.pdf, .doc, .ps, etc).

-All the scientific production, formal and informal, draft or 
definitive, published or unpublished, should be available from a unique 
web site.

Results show already well known patterns, as the large thematic 
repositories still lead the ranking (CiteseerX, Arxiv, RepEc). National 
repositories, consisting of records coming from different institutions 
(HAL) are also in top positions.

 

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Isidro F. Aguillo, HonPhD
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28, 3C1. 28037 Madrid. Spain

Ph. 91-602 2890. Fax: 91-602 2971

isidro.aguillo @ cchs.csic.es
www. webometrics.info
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