EconStor among the TOP25 repositories in Europe

Posted: February 26th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off

New edition of webometrics ranking compares repositories worldwide and by region according to several categories.

The “Ranking Web of Repositories” is a service provided by the Spanish Reseseach Organization CSIC. Besides comparing repositories it also ranks Universities, Business Schools and Hospitals. The repository ranking is published every 6 months, now in it’s 12th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 52 worldwide, with the TOP positions held by SSRN, ArXiv and the NASA Astrophysics Data System. Looking at fulltext content only (category “rich files”), EconStor fares even better, being now number 15 worldwide and number 7 in Europe.

 

 


COAR publishes open letter to Elsevier

Posted: February 7th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off

In support for the researchers initiative “The Cost of Knowledge” against Elsevier’s business practices, the international repository network COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) released an open letter to the publisher yesterday. In the letter COAR

“urges Elsevier to reconsider its prohibitive approach to open access and revise its policies to allow the deposit of research articles with minimum delay. We encourage publishers to work closely with the library and repository communities to develop effective and sustainable methods for article deposit that serve the needs of researchers, their institutions”


Final Report of PEER analyses current publication process

Posted: January 23rd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Monthly Report | Tags: , , | Comments Off

The EU-funded project PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) analyses the scholarly publication process with a focus the impact of repositories on journal publishing.

The final report, which is now available (http://www.peerproject.eu/reports/) states the importance of  the  right publication strategy:

“Today, the distinctions between the three [scholarly research publication] models (subscription based, OA or repositories) are blurred, although it is becoming clear that the success of OA journals and repositories – as is the case for subscription based journals – depends on the strategies of individual players, and not merely OA status. The success of BioMed Central and PLoS  proves that OA status does not equate in principle to lower quality of research as was suggested initially by some concerned authors. At the same time, OA status does not in itself automatically lead to higher citation and visibility for the authors. In the case of repositories, while some (such as REPEC and ArXiv) succeeded in becoming a starting point and not just a destination in scholarly search (i.e. a site actively searched for and not referred to via a keyword based search), many other repositories are less visible.”

 


ZBW Leibniz Gemeinschaft Open Access DFG