EconStor passes the mark of 100,000 full-texts

Germany’s most important repository for economics now belongs to the twelve largest Open Access archives worldwide.

EconStor, the Open Access publication server of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and also Germany’s most important repository for economics, now offers more than 100,000 freely available documents. In the “Ranking Web of Repositories” EconStor is ranked number 12 among more than 2,200 listed archives (category rich files) worldwide.  

This year, EconStor has grown to impressive size. It now offers more than 100,000 freely accessible full texts. Back in 2011 there were only 25,000, growing to  50,000 full-texts in 2013.

Researchers in economics from all over the world value the repository’s services for three reasons:

1. as a source of information: 2.8 million downloads were counted in 2014 (compared to 1.3 million downloads in 2012),
2. as a place where research institutions and individual researchers can archive their publications permanently, safely and citable,
3. as a distributor into much frequented databases – e.g. EconStor is one of the ten most widely used full-text archives within the RePEc network.

EconStor assembles more than 90 per cent of all Economics working papers from Germany and disseminates it on the web. Around 400 national and international institutions use the repository to share their papers, among them Princeton University, the Tinbergen Institute, the Stockholm School of Economics or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Usage statistics prove EconStor’s international success: About 80 per cent of all downloads come from abroad (mainly from USA, China, the UK and France).

Olaf Siegert, head of publication services at the ZBW, summarises the merits of the repository: “EconStor makes an important contribution to scholarly communication in economics. Our customers value the visibility and findability of their papers in search engines such as Google Scholar, whereas users appreciate the barrier-free and quick access to scholarly publications they look for.”

Webometrics Ranking confirms: EconStor among the 20 biggest Repositories worldwide

New edition of webometrics ranking now also includes Altmetrics indicators. EconStor ranks at number 17 concerning full-text documents.

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 14th edition.

The latest edition, which was published this week, introduced a new element among the relevant criteria for the ranking: The “Altmetrics”-Element (which accounts for 25% of the ranking) is monitoring services like Twitter, Wikipedia and Google+ and looks up, how often repository documents are mentioned in these service.

The new Webometrics repository ranking sees EconStor at number 45 (out of 1750 repositories worldwide) in the overall ranking. When it comes to the number of PDF-Documents within a repository (category “rich files”), EconStor comes out even better at Number 17. Concerning the coverage in Google Scholar, we rank at number 21.

EconStor climbs to number 29 in new Webometrics repository ranking

New edition of webometrics ranking compares over 1700 repositories worldwide 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 13th edition.

Compared to earlier rankings EconStor has climbed several places and now ranks at number 29 worldwide, climbing almost 50 places (from number 77) within one year! And in the European Repository ranking EconStor now stands at number 11.

The TOP5 positions of the ranking are also held by subject based repositories or databases (ArXiv, RePEc, PubMed Central, Citeseer and SSRN).

EconStor among the TOP25 repositories in Europe

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

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

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.”