”Nicolae Testemitanu” State University of Medicine and Pharmacy Repository advanced 556 positions in the ranking of digital institutional archives at the global level

Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy from the Republic of Moldova climbed 556 positions in the ranking of online institutional repositories worldwide and remains second nationally. According to the report made public by the Ranking Web of Repositories (Webometrics https://repositories.webometrics.info/en/institutional) in May 2021, our institution ranks 498th and has 8,750 indexed records on Google Scholar.

Olesea Dobrea, Deputy Director of Health Sciences Library of Nicolae Testemitanu University, stated that this result was favored to some extent by the pandemic situation. With the establishment of the remote work schedule for certain categories of employees, librarians have prioritized their activity, focusing on the development of the electronic segment of information resources, namely by placing open access publications in the Institutional Repository (IR). Thus, at the end of 2019, in the IR there were 5611 publications of Nicolae Testemitanu University, at the end of 2020 – 11877, while in June this year – 15,399 records. This is a result that pleases and encourages university community members to publish the results of open access research, contributing to increasing the University’s global visibility, the individual prestige of authors and institutions, as well as the scientific impact of the works.

The purpose of this ranking is to support open access initiatives and to facilitate free access to scientific publications and other academic materials in electronic format. Web indicators are used to measure the overall visibility and impact of scientific repositories.

The organizers of the ranking encourage virtual space publishing as a way to present scientific materials, maintaining high quality standards. In this way, the sites reach a much larger potential audience, providing access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions from developing countries as well as to third parties (economically, industrially, politically or culturally interested parties) from their own community. The ranking aims to motivate institutions and researchers to be present on the web and to accurately reflect their activities.

The current Webometrics ranking evaluates 2871 national, institutional and thematic repositories worldwide.