QUT ePrints Archive Update : February 2008 : World Ranking of Repositories

The latest statistics (February 2008) for the QUT ePrints Archive indicate there are 9337 items in the repository with 1316 registered users.

981 new records were created in 2007. This represents a deposit rate almost double that of 2006 when 2202 new records were created. Many of these new records were created for the RQF and, although they are linked to the published version, some have no open access (OA) copy (postprint version) attached. However, at least some of the records created for the RQF included OA fulltext with the proportion of our total records that include OA fulltext still relatively high (approximately 75%).

A few days ago, the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities launched their new Ranking of Repositories as given at http://www.webometrics.info/top200_rep.asp.
QUT’s institutional repository QUT ePrints Archive, was the highest ranking Australian repository in the list.

With a rank of 28, we are the only Australian repository in the top 50.  Large international discipline-based repositories (such as RePEc, ArXiv and the Arts & Humanities Data Service) are included in the list so our ranking would be even higher if only institutional repositories were being compared.
The ranking is based on visibility, number of pages (records) and number of ‘rich files’ (eg .doc, .ppt, .pdf ). That latter gives an indication of the amount of fulltext material in the repository.

This is becoming increasingly important as many universities have recently ingested tens of thousands of metadata-only records (i.e bibliographic details but no OA fulltext).