Best advice directly from the Google Scholar desk
During the last OR2015 conference, the main developer of Google Scholar, Anurag Acharya made a presentation regarding the best practices for repositories being indexed by GS, that as you know is one iof the key indicators of this ranking. As it is a very important document we strongly suggest to download it and to follow the advices if you intend to increase your ranking performance,
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The indicator used for estimating the visibility (impact) of the items deposited in the repositories is the number of external inlinks they received, considering as the targeted URLs those that are using the domain or subdomain of the repository. For example:
http://www.teses.usp.br/*
where the asterisk refer to all the webpages and documents independently of their format.
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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.
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One of the most frequently used arguments in favor of depositing papers in a repository is to preserve the rights of the hosted institutions that pay the research done by the authors of those papers. Most of these rights usually refer to exploitation rights but many times the even more important moral rights are forgotten. Moral rights intends to preserve the authorship and integrity of the document (nobody can overwrite the text or usurp the author) that can be also extended to the institutional authorship.
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During the last months, we realized there are several open access repositories that are not indexed by Google Scholar. Probably some of them are no longe active, or the web address has changed, or perhaps there are barriers to the indexing GS crawlers.
These are an incomplete list of such repositories. Please contact us for providing information about them: Isidro F. Aguillo.
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The main aim of the Ranking Web of Repositories is not really to rank them, but to promote Open Access initiatives and global access to academic knowledge. Following that objective we promote good practices, especially those intended to increase the visibility and usage of the OA contents.
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