Open access to scientific information through institutional digital repositories presents today’s world information environment and the transformations imposed by information society.
The first Romanian institutional repository was implemented at Transilvania University of Brasov. As part of the undertaken research, the visibility and the impact of the university’s scientific production was measured using the scientific methods of scientometry, as a fundamental instrument for determining the international value of an university as well as for the statistical evaluation of scientific research results.
The results showed that an open access institutional repository would significantly add to the visibility of the university’s scientific production.In this article we define the scientific production and productivity and present the main indicators for the measurement of the scientific activity.
The impact of the research is analyzed and measured through scientometric indicators. The analysis of the citations represents a scientometric indicator for the evaluation of the scientific researches.
Through the number of citations we can analyse the quality of the scientific information. Google Scholar was used as a scientometric database which can be consulted free of charge on the Internet and which indexes academic papers from institutional repositories, identifying also the referenced citations.
The free “Publish or Perish” software can be used as an analysis instrument for the impact of the research, by analysing the citations through the h-index.
We present the methodology and the results of an exploratory study made at the Transilvania University of Brasov regarding the h-index of the academic staff. H-index was calculated by using “Publish or Perish” software, comparing the number of ISI indexed published articles and the number of citations from “ISI Web of Science”.
Using “Publish or Perish”, we calculated h-index, g-index, hc-index and HI norm. We analyzed the research performances achieved by Brasov academic community in 2008, as realised in their annual evaluation -number of papers, books, research contracts, etc- by comparing the four indexes of those 60 professors with the best results.
We will present correlation indicators and the importance of open access for increasing the impact of scientific research by using institutional repositories.
URL : https://www.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-repanovici-en.pdf