FW: [OACI Working Group] more on the web impact factor (fwd)

[David Goodman]

I call particular attention to their well-thought=out listing of best practices
http://www.webometrics.info/best_practices.html
and especially to the section in it that says:
-----------------------------
2. Contents: Create

"A large web presence is made possible only with the effort of a large group of authors. The best way to do that is
allowing a large proportion of staff, researchers or graduate students to be potential authors.
A distributed system of authoring can be operative at several levels:

 Central organisation can be responsible of the design guidelines and institutional information
 Libraries, documentation centres and similar services can be responsible of large databases, including bibliographic
ones but also large repositories (thesis, pre-prints, and reports)
 Individual persons or teams should maintain their own websites, enriching them with self archiving practices.

Hosting external resources can be interesting for third parties and increase the visibility: Conference websites, software
repositories, scientific societies and their publications, especially electronic journals."
-------------------------------
I am not sure that an individual institution would be well-advised to
develop all these paths simultaneously, but all suggestions should
be kept in mind when looking for support.

Personally, I think it wisest to begin with an archive for OA papers,
which is so simple, so cheap, and sure of an immediate effect. But
if  support can best be gotten though additional uses, I wouldn't
turn it down. If the proposed project seems too large and difficult,
perhaps the best strategy is to accept the support and join in,
but  start by providing a separate simple  OA site as a possible pilot.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman at princeton.edu