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.
Our point of view is that an Open Access Institutional Repository, including the full texts of the documents, is the TREASURE of the university, not another bibliographic databasel. We support the development of publicly open CRIS, an important tool for the information management of the university outputs. But mixing the bureacratic aims with the mission of the university repository, ie to increase the access to and the visibility of the knowledge generated by the university, is not the correct strategy.
The Ranking is also a powerful tool for penalizing bad practices, with especial emphasis in the awful naming proposals by software developers that ignore librarian traditions and in many ways are going against intellectual rights of depositing authors.
We truly believe the lengthy and useless addresses coined for the repository items have a negative impact in their web visibility and affect the authors will to deposit as it makes difficult the citation of full texts in future papers.
In previous editions we penalized the incorrect naming of the filetypes, such as not using pdf suffix for the acrobat files. Unfortunately, the way in which Google Scholar recognizes this situation was far from perfect, so many repository managers does not recognize the true purpose of filtering by filetype but a methodology error.
Proposal as updated 11th September 2014
As the pdf issue is only a minor part of a problem, we decide to fix it and to focus on the more important topics. We are opening a public discussion on these issues and the following proposals are being updated according to the comments we recieve before next edition of the ranking scheduled for late January 2015:
For example, it will be acceptable:
http://repository.university.edu/thesis/physics/smith2014d.pdf
On the contrary, these are not:
http://powerpoint.microsoft.com/university/23/fulltext/348/8978903
.../handle/2027.42/108253
.../bitstream/handle/item/32178
.../cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5969&context=scholarship
.../docviews/abstract.php?lang=ger&id=40874
..../docs/00/99/21/72/PDF/mdm-access-to-healthcare-europe-2014.pdf
Other examples of bad practices:
http://repository.domain.edu:8080/dspace not redirecting to http://repository.domain.edu/
Similarly with .../jspui/ or .../xmlui/
Comments to the editor [email protected]