Quick note on this: they’ve added some caveats to their proposals – worth re-reading now…

This certainly sounds a bit quixotic – really not sure what it’s trying to achieve beyond a personal preference on URL naming methods!

“...especial emphasis in the awful naming proposals by software developers that ignore librarian traditions and in many ways are going against intellectual rights of depositing authors. We truly believe the lengthy and useless addresses coined for the repository items have a negative impact in their web visibility and affect the authors will to deposit as it makes difficult the citation of full texts in future papers.”

From the perspective of (5), about twenty or so UK universities use eprints.*.ac.uk hostnames (not counting departmental ones) and another half-dozen dspace.*.ac.uk. This proposal would quietly delist such organisations as Glasgow, Southampton, Newcastle, and the LSE...

(the URL structure proposals are even stranger – a hostname can be fixed, but the prohibition on things like handle/2027.42 may as well just say “we personally dislike this bit of software”.)

Andrew.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for forwarding this on – it’s interesting (and worrying / a bit silly / stupid).

(2) - As a consortium, we’re pretty much screwed.

(5) - I wonder what they make of ‘eprints’ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eprint] vs ‘ePrints’?

I’ll be bending their ear about these proposals!

Cheers,

John

Hi All,

I picked this up from another list I am subscribed to, and thought I would share, as some of these will impact ePrint systems….  The list member noticed it on one of their DSpace lists that they are subscribed to,

  “     A proposal from the Webometrics team to change the criteria for including or excluding IR's in the list and for modifying some of the ranking criteria.

            Main proposed changes are:

1.           Calculation of Scholar indicator will no longer be filtered by pdf.

2.           Institutional repositories that don’t use the institutional domain will be excluded.

3.           Pseudo-institutional repositories of academic subunits will be excluded.

4.           Repositories using ports others than 80 or 8080

5.           Institutional repositories that use the name of the software in the host name will be excluded.

6.           Institutional repositories that use more than 4 directory levels for the URL address of the full texts will be excluded.

7.           Institutional repositories that use more than 3 different numeric (or useless) codes in their URLs will be excluded.

8.           Repositories with more than 50% of the records not linking OA full text versions, except those CRIS disguised as repositories

Some of these will obviously be controversial so please note that Webometrics are open to input on the proposal until the next ranking update in Jan 2015. 

                More detail at http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/node/26

   ”

I don’t know if they are trying to deliberately game the system, but I don’t like the idea of a ‘ranking’ system for IR’s where you arbitrarily exclude certain players for nonsensical reasons.

Cheers,

Matt

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