Ranking Web of World Repositories

[Stevan Harnad <amsciforum@gmail.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Isidro F. Aguillo <isidro.aguillo -- cchs.csic.es>
Date: Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 4:32 AM
Subject: Ranking Web of World Repositories

The January edition of the Ranking Web of Repositories is just 
published.

http://repositories.webometrics.info/

The number of repositories is growing fast worldwide but still 
many of them does not have their own domain or subdomain, and for 
this reason it is not possible to add them in our analysis. Some 
institutions maintain several databases with completely different 
URLs which penalize the global visibility they have.

We are still unable to add usage/download statics but there are 
many initiatives already working on standardization of the 
collecting methods, so we expect that global data could be 
available soon.

Following several requests we now show two global Rankings. One 
that covers all repositories as was shown in previous editions 
(Top 300), and a new one that focus only on Institutional 
Repositories (Top 300 Institutional).

There is a minor change regarding the calculation of the number 
of rich files as in this new edition we are using again other 
formats than pdf (doc, ppt, ps) to obtain the data. Contrary to 
the methodology we used to make the other Rankings, the figures 
for rich files are combined and not treated individually.

The French HAL central repository, and its subsets like INRIA, 
Social Sciences and Humanities (HAL-SHS) or IN2P3, are at the top 
of the institutional repository list.

Important repositories like PubMedCentral, CiteSeerX and 
Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, do not use standard 
suffixes to design their contents (e.g. papers in acrobat format 
with file names which extension is not .pdf). This is a bad 
practice as it reduces the visibility of these documents to the 
search engines.

Our policy is not to include collectors or metarepositories, with 
one exception which is DiVa, the interface that the Uppsala 
University provides to more than 20 Nordic repositories. Many of 
these institutions do not have their own systems but link their 
contents to the DiVa portal. Unfortunately, this means that many 
of the papers are under different domains and then they do not 
contribute to the DiVa's rank.

*************************************
Isidro F. Aguillo
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28, 3C1. 28037 Madrid. Spain
isidro.aguillo -- cchs.csic.es
www. webometrics.info