July 2008 Edition!

Following the schedule, the first edition (non beta) of the Ranking Web of World Repositories is available with data updated in July 2008. We are still working on the ranking, so comments and suggestions are welcomed. The major changes are as follows:

- New repositories have been added, like PubMedCentral that was inadvertently missed from the previous edition. Other repositories not focused on research papers have been excluded.

- Rich files ranking is now including only Adobe Acrobat pdf files, as the numbers involved for other formats are very low for ranking purposes. For the same reason, only data extracted from Google and Yahoo are considered for this indicator.

- Scholar ranking is build now on the mean between the total number of items and those published between 2001 and 2008. This is to increase the weight of the "fresh papers" deposited.

In the future we intend to make a classification of the Repositories and to publish different Rankings according to that taxonomy

Proposal to webmasters for 2009 edition

Usage data could be very useful for the Ranking Web of World Repositories as it has been suggested by most of the academic community. It is difficult to obtain data from every repository and in fact most of the figures are not comparable because there is no standard yet about statistics collection. We suggest using a common, simple and free system to solve, at least partially, this problem. We ask to webmasters to install Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) at their websites. We will then be able to kindly ask you for the statistics collected during the period from July 1st -December 31st so this data can be used for the January 2009 edition of the Ranking.

New website for the Ranking of R&D centers

In order to increase the visibility of the Ranking and Directory Web of Research Centers which is covering more than 7,000 organizations worldwide, a separate website has been created. Please visit the new domain at http://research.webometrics.info/ or use the banner at the right hand side.

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