Open access repositories are a reliable source of academic items that can be used for testing the capabilities of the webometric analysis. This paper deals with actions needed for extracting web indicators from bibliographic records in open access repositories, provides guidelines to support a further webometric study and presents the results of a preliminary web impact evaluation carried out over a sample of 1386 EU FP7 output papers available from the OpenAIRE database. The European Commission project OpenAIRE aims, among other objectives, to provide impact measures to assess the research performance from repositories contents and, especially, of Special Clause 39 project participants within EU FP7. Using URL citations, title mentions and copies of titles as main web impact indicators, this study suggests that a priori the implementation of the mandatory clause SC39 to encourage open access to European research may be resulted indeed in a greater and more immediate web visibility of these papers.

This work is supported by OpenAIRE project, grant agreement number 246686, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union (EU).

17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), 5-8 September, 2012 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (13 p.)

Peer reviewed