Address:

222357, Minsk, Svobody square, 2

Reception phone number:

+375 (1772) 5-55-72

Operating mode:

from 8.00 to 13.00 and from 14.00 to 17.00 on weekdays

hotline: +375 (1772) 5-55-72

BSU Digital Library among world's top three institutional repositories

Wednesday, 23 September 2020

MINSK, 23 September (BelTA) – Belarusian State University (BSU) Digital Library remains the leader among institutional repositories of Europe and is one of the world's three best institutional repositories, BelTA learned from the BSU press service.

As of September 2020, the BSU Digital Library rounded out the top three in the global ranking of institutional repositories “Transparent Ranking: Institutional Repositories by Google Scholar”, placing behind the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and Kyoto University (Japan). The gap in the number of collected items between the second and third places was around 1,000. In the ranking of all repositories featuring such large international archives as PubMed Central and Arxiv.org, the BSU Digital Library climbed from the 12th to the 9th position. This was possible thanks to its efforts to digitize documents that are evaluated by Google Scholar.

The ranking also featured institutional repositories of other Belarusian universities: Belarusian National Technical University (47), Belarusian State Economic University (146), Masherov Vitebsk State University (182), Belarusian State Medical University (227), Belarusian State Technological University (295), Polessky State University (307), Belarusian State Agrarian Technical University (456), Kuleshov Mogilev State University (425), Sukhoi Gomel State Technical University (506), Yanka Kupala Grodno State University (547), the Belarusian-Russian University (722), and Maksim Tank Belarusian State University (845).

Ukraine's Sumy State University (43rd) and National Technical University “Kharkov Polytechnic University” (86th) and Russia's Ural Federal University (38th), Tomsk State University (72nd) and Kazan Federal University (88th) showed the highest results among universities of Belarus' neighboring countries.

All in all, the ranking featured more than 3,000 repositories of universities and research centers from all over the globe. They were ranked by the number of collected items, which was evaluated by the web search engine Google Scholar. Europe PubMed Centra, Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System, and CiteSeerХ topped the ranking.

The ranking is compiled to support open access to academic publications and teaching materials in the digital form. Its creators aim to motivate researchers to publish results of their studies on the internet. Thus, the ranking estimates the level of openness of academic resources and the level of their integration into the global information space.

The BSU Digital Library has been featured in the ranking since 2012. It is one of the largest repositories in the world in terms of the number of collected items. At present, it comprises more than 180,000 publications of the BSU researchers and teaching staff. Support for the open science movement, thorough work of the staff of the library, and proper management of metadata enables the BSU Digital Library to hold leading positions.