January 2010 Edition!

As in previous edition we provide two global Rankings. One that covers all repositories (Top400) and another that focuses only on Institutional Repositories (Top 400 Institutional). We are considering to include in future editions portals of journals and papers (super repositories).

The composite index (World Ranking) is computed combining normalized values instead of ranks. The visibility is calculated giving extra importance to the external inlinks not coming from generic domains (.com, .org, .net). The figures for rich files (pdf, doc, ppt, ps, and new for this edition, xls) are combined and not treated individually.

Suggestions from the Ranking Editors

The role of librarians in the Open Access movement has been very important as they are the main designers, promoters and maintainers of institutional repositories. The basic principles behind the current arrangement of repositories are inspired by the librarianship techniques.

However, some decisions guided by these principles are probably hampering the universal adoption of the Open Access initiatives (OAI), as they are ignoring the main users of these repositories: scientists, researchers, scholars.

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.

Comments on results

Unfortunately problems with the server of the E-LIS repository have leaded to an incomplete coverage of its full contents by the main search engines by the time we have collected the data for the actual edition. So the current delayed position does not reflect the real rank of E-LIS.

As usual we will thank your comments if you address them to our MAILBOX .