The Participation and Web Visibility of University Digital Repositories in the European Context

Abstract

This study focuses on academic institutional repositories as tools that allow us open access to scientific and academic production. Specifically, we analyze the Top 50 European University repositories differentiating, firstly, those repositories linked to Spanish universities compared to those belonging to universities throughout Europe and, secondly, repositories that only include research content as opposed to those that also include teaching content. Specifically, this work complements previous studies on the consolidation of the repositories, focusing on the analysis of the competitive environment by considering their participation and relative visibility shares. The analysis, using competitive maps and comparative advantage method, allows us to identify European university repositories that lead their segments, in terms of their levels of participation and web visibility in the market. In general, without distinguishing by segments, results show that the leadership at European level in terms of participation is held by the University College of London (UK) and the repository of the University of Umea (Sweden) is the leader in visibility..