The second edition of the 2011 Ranking Web of Repositories has been published at the end of July. Â It is available from the Webometrics portal:
http://repositories.webometrics.info/ The number of repositories is growing fast, especially in academic institutions from developing countries. As in previous editions the subject repositories still appear in the top positions, with large institutional ones following them. There are no relevant changes in this edition, but the editors are making a plea to the Open Access community regarding a few aspects related to intellectual property issues. The papers and other documents deposited in institutional repositories are probably the main asset of those institutions. As important as giving free access to others is the proper recognition of the authorship of the scientific documents. Unfortunately a few institutions are hosting their repositories in websites outside the main webdomain of its organization and many repositories are recommending to use systems like handle and others purl-like URLs for citing (linking) the deposited items. This means that moral rights regarding institutional authorship are ignored, relevant information about authors is missed and the semantic possibilities of the web address are not explored. Nowadays it is already common to add the URL address of the full text document in the bibliographic references of the published papers. Logically the link to the full text in the institutional repository can be used for that purpose, but researchers are facing options that ignore their institutional affiliation, with strange meaningless codes, prone to typos or other mistakes and pointing to metadata pages not to the full text documents. Obviously for authors it could be more profitable to host the papers in their personal pages instead doing it in institutional repositories whose naming policies have relevant copyright issues. Our position is that end-users should be taken into account, that web addresses are going to place in important role in citing behavior, that citations are the key tool for evaluation of authors, that institutions are investing large amounts of money in their repositories in exchange of prestige and impact and that providing permanent address is the duty of the institution, nor responsibility of external third-parties. Comments are welcomed  -- =============================== Isidro F. Aguillo, HonPhD The Cybermetrics Lab IPP-CCHS-CSIC Albasanz, 26-28 (3C1) 28037 Madrid. Spain isidro.aguillo @ cchs.csic.es ===============================
