Most Valuable Open Access Repositories in Germany

What makes a good open access publication repository next to the scientific quality and impact of its content? The assumption that lies behind the metric of this ranking (see criteria and scores in the right column) is that the quality of an open access repository is the sum of its characteristics, services and commitments being of value to the user, (harvesting) service providers and the open access movement as a whole. Based on 2014 Census of Open Access Repositories in Germany, Austria and Switzerland [1] data that has been categorized for this ranking into General Information, Usability, Value-added Services, Metadata, Interoperability and Community. The metric is a first sketch that tries to take up the challenge of finding a proper definition of what is a high quality open access repository. This metric is not meant to be a final metric and needs future iterations based on the feedback of the repository manager community. The development of such an open metric together with the community is openness and transparency at its best.

The upcoming project Open Access Repository Ranking [2] will present what is visualized on this poster in a continious way. The idea of this ranking is to provide the community with an overview of what is best practice and how this can be achieved. The incentives to improve a service by taking up small steps eventually will lead to an overall improvement of the open access repository landscape.

[1] For the research data of the 2014 Census see:  http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10734

[2]   For the ranking metric see: www.repositoryranking.org