The Webometrics.info project uses four metrics to calculate a ranking of the online research profile of the world’s universities:
- Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
- Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
- Rich files: Number of PDF, Postscript, Word and Powerpoint documents published, based on results from the four search engines.
- Scholar: Number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.
Based on this ranking, Melbourne University is 6th in Australia and 128th in the world for the online profile of its research output.
Restricting the comparison to institutional repositories, our ePrints repository ranks 157th in the world. (what is an institutional repository?)
Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Centro Superior de Investigaciones CientÃficas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.
From the About Webometrics page:
The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community…
We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.
Given our relatively low ranking, does Melbourne need to change its approach to making research output available online? How committed are we to making the outcomes of our research freely available?
What level of rigor, if any, do we wish to exert in verifying the quality of what is published on University servers?
What is our commitment to making the underlying research data accessible to support our research? Our teaching? Our knowledge transfer obligations? If the research data is of national or international significance, who will ensure its long-term preservation and access? How will this be funded?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these curly questions — just click the ‘comments’ link below and start typing!
(tip o’ the hat to Library Intelligencer for the Webometrics link, and to the Information Futures Commission project team for the list of questions)