SUNScholar, number one position in Africa

The ranking is performed by “The Ranking Web of World Repositories“. SUNScholar is managed by the Library and Information Service at Stellenbosch University. Not only does the repository hold first position on the continent, but it occupies an overall 84^th position worldwide among 2275 repositories.  In the ‘instutitional respositories (IR) only’ ranking, SUNScholar comes in at 68^th position.

Professor Eugene Cloete, Vice-Rector: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies, says “The achievement of the Library and Information Service in strengthening and developing SUNScholar is significant. This achievement supports Stellenbosch University’s commitment to Open Access to scientific information and the promotion of research output and innovation as a central goal of Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies.”

The aim of SUNScholar is to improve the visibility and access to Stellenbosch University’s research output. Research outcomes are openly shared with the rest of the world, as well as preserved in a central archive. “Achieving this number one ranking is indeed proof that SU research output is shared with as wide an audience as possible and that African research is increasingly accessible globally”, says Ellen Tise, Senior Director of the Library and Information Service.

The aim of the Ranking Web of World Repositories is “to support Open Access initiatives and therefore the free access to scientific publications in an electronic form and to other academic material. The web indicators are used here to measure the global visibility and impact of the scientific repositories”*. The Ranking considers specific criteria when assessing repositories. These include size, visibility, rich files and scholar. The “scholar” criterion refers to the total number of items from the repository obtained from Google Scholar.

For more information, contact Mimi Seyffert-Wirth.

* Ranking Web of Repositories. 2016. Objectives. Available from http://repositories.webometrics.info/en/Objetives