New Ranking of Repositories

[Isidro F. Aguillo]

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (www.webometrics.info 
<http://www.webometrics.info>) has been updated with data collected 
during January 2008. The main new service offered is the Ranking of 
Repositories that presents the best 200 ones of the world. The best 
ranked are three largest thematic Open Access deposits: Arxiv, dedicated 
to physics and related sciences; RePEc, a big effort being made by the 
economic science world; and E-LIS committed to Library and Information 
Sciences and Documentation.

The ranking still show a concerning  academic digital divide between 
North American universities and the European ones, as almost the 60% of 
the 200 first positions are occupied by North American universities. On 
the first positions of the ranking are MIT, Stanford and Harvard 
universities. The University of Cambridge, which goes down the list 
until 27th position, continues being the first European university that 
appears in the ranking followed by Oxford and the Swiss Federal 
Institute of Technology of Zurich. It is also worth to mention the good 
results obtained in general by the Canadian universities that maintains 
several institutions very well positioned.

Nordic universities like Helsinki and Uppsala universities continue to 
improving their positions in the ranking. And also the universities of 
Geneva, Amsterdam and Leipzig show an interesting progress.

Australian National University in Oceania and UNAM from Mexico in Latin 
America are improving their positions as regional leaders but they are 
also close to world leaders status.

Another interesting result observed is the improvement that Japanese 
universities are experimenting. Tokyo and Kyoto universities are 
increasing their position in the ranking which reflects the commitment 
of these institutions to web publishing. Also, it is worth to mention 
the progress that some Chinese universities like the National Taiwan 
University, and the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University 
of Hong Kong are doing.

Regarding Research Councils there is also a predominance of North 
American organizations, like the NIH and NASA in the 2 first positions, 
but the European CNRS, Max Planck and CERN are among the top ten 
positions in our ranking.

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Isidro F. Aguillo
Laboratorio de Cibermetría
Cybermetrics Lab
CCHS - CSIC
Joaquin Costa, 22
28002 Madrid. Spain

isidro @ cindoc.csic.es
+34-91-5635482 ext 313
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