I’ve always been sceptical about league tables and my reaction to rankings of this sort is almost always in direct proportion to where the organisation I am working in is placed.  (In the case of the University World Rankings, the IOE  came 7th and so this must surely make us No. 1 in the UK as per my tongue-in-cheek tweet?!).  Anyway, I digress.

I am writing about rankings to inform you that the Newsam Library’s DERA – which stands for Digital Education Resource Archive and which contains documents published electronically by the UK government and related bodies in the area of education- came 233rd out of 1654 repositories  in the Ranking of World Repositories. This  is quite an achievement when you consider that DERA is a new comer on the scene of the social science repositories for it was only launched in 2011.

Of note in this league table is the open access repository that takes first place – the  Social Science Research Network .   The Social Science Research Network or SSRN as it is commonly referred to was founded in 1994.  The database  is searchable and you can download full-text articles (preprint versions) upon registration.  The search results are ranked by the number of downloads (which is a rather arbitrary ranking system of ranking). Although SSRN began in America, it is international in scope and many researchers use it to disseminate their work more widely.  SSRN ensures quick distribution via mirror sites at European Corporate Governance Institute (London), Korea University (Seoul), Stanford Law School (California) and University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Illinois).

The IOE LibGuides on ‘Finding’ and ‘Accessing Resources Remotely’ lists the SSRN among other open access resources relevant to education and the social sciences at http://libguides.ioe.ac.uk/openaccess.

Nazlin Bhimani