ODU Website Ranked Among Top 15 Percent of Schools

Old Dominion University has finished in the top 15 percent of worldwide universities in a ranking of school Web sites by a Spanish information agency.

The "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities" is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

It ranked the top 4,000 schools worldwide, in terms of their Web sites' size and visibility, and number of rich files and links to papers, reports and other scholarly research.

After the numbers were crunched, ODU finished 561st out of the 4,000 schools ranked. ODU finished ahead of several U.S. schools on the list, including the University of North Carolina, Indiana University, the University of North Dakota and Pepperdine University.

ODU's ranking was helped by the fact it was rated 244th on the number of rich files accessible on the Web site. The university ranked 695th in size, 674th in visibility and 929th on the amount of scholarly material on the site.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology finished with the CSIC's top ranking. In fact, the top 23 spots were occupied by schools in the United States.

The goal of the ranking isn't to put schools on a list, but rather to promote open access of academic material online, according to CSIC.

"If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases in the volume and quality of their electronic publications," the agency says in its news release.

CSIC says Web publication is cheaper, and allows universities' scholarly material to potentially reach much larger audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions in developing countries, and to economic or political third parties in their own community.