{"id":741,"date":"2011-06-14T15:20:34","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T15:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/?p=741"},"modified":"2011-06-14T15:20:34","modified_gmt":"2011-06-14T15:20:34","slug":"concerns-about-competative-metrics-for-repositories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/2011\/06\/14\/concerns-about-competative-metrics-for-repositories\/","title":{"rendered":"Concerns about competative metrics for Repositories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m deeply concerned about the power lying in the webometrics league table. http:\/\/repositories.webometrics.info\/toprep_inst.asp<\/a><\/p>\n

The give a ranking bonus for your number of \u201cRich Files\u201d, which basicaly means \u201cNumber of PDFs\u201d. This means that if we were to push for using \u201cscholarly HTML\u201d rather than PDF than our rank would drop.<\/p>\n

Currently eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk is at 22 and eprints.soton.ac.uk is at 60. \u2014 I couldn\u2019t tell you why, but stats isn\u2019t my strong suit.<\/p>\n

My real concen is that this league table will stifle innovation by only measuring common quality factors, rather than promoting new ones. Also, I think the \u2018delta\u2019 is more important than the size, and always have. The success criteria for the TARDIS project, which launched eprints.soton was that it should have a number (2000, I think) of records by a date. I opposed that at the time, and still think it was wrong. A better criteria would have been a sustained deposit rate and (in the first 2 years) a continuous increasing number of contributors.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/roar.eprints.org\/<\/a> is run by one of my colleagues, but I\u2019m very happy to see that they show graphs of \u2018deposit activity\u2019 rather than size. This shows that eprints.soton is in very robust healt; http:\/\/roar.eprints.org\/1423\/<\/a> with a sustained level of daily deposits over the past few years.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s unhealthy is that a drop in the ranking for eprints.soton caused the board which oversees the site to discuss how to improve our rankings, and there was no really obvious way I could see to do it without generating un-necisary additional PDF files. Of course this was rejected as a silly idea, but my fear is that other sites may feel pressured to improve their ranking and make bad decisions. The community should be calling the shots of what metrics make a good repository. I\u2019m not sure what those metrics should be, but they should be as careful as they can to avoid a situation where I can inflate my score by making my repository worse, eg. by encouraging bad formats like PDF.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve not heard the PDF rant, then in short it\u2019s that people write and read papers primariy on computers. In most cases they write in a format with some markup (latex or Word) and then convert it to simulated sheets of A4 paper (PDF). Computers rarely have displays whre an A4 page is useful. I don\u2019t see how it\u2019s acceptable to produce papers (gah, even the name is inappropriate) which cant\u2019 be comfortably viewed on my landscape laptop screen, on my phone, and on the iPad I might justify buying one day. Reading papers is one of the key things an academic does for a living and it\u2019s still easier to read them by printing them out first.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some people moving in the right direction, at least: http:\/\/scholarlyhtml.org\/<\/a> but the repository and research-publication community needs to be goaded into this direction out of it\u2019s PDF comfort zone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m deeply concerned about the power lying in the webometrics league table. http:\/\/repositories.webometrics.info\/toprep_inst.asp The give a ranking bonus for your number of \u201cRich Files\u201d, which basicaly means \u201cNumber of PDFs\u201d. This means that if we were to push for using \u201cscholarly HTML\u201d rather than PDF than our rank would drop. Currently eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk is at 22 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[313],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-repositories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}