 Web is already the main scholarly communication tool ◦ OAI (Open Access Initiatives)  Web publication is richer and diverse covering both scientific and educational activities ◦ Especially informal communication  Web presence increases visibility of institutions and the impact of their activities ◦ But there is a larger than expected academic digital divide ◦ There are important barriers to the presence of scholars and their activities in the Web ◦ In the near future Web indicators will be an important part of the evaluation procedures ◦ Web Search engines are the new knowledge intermediaries and web positioning is becoming more and more relevant

Of our research/scholarly manuscripts, and other knowledge we generate, a good estimate is that only 1-4% of the worlds academicians can afford to buy/subscribe and have the opportunity to read and benefit from them Many in poor countries (and some in rich countries) do not even know of the fantastic theories and literature that scholars like in your University have produced

A picture is worth a 1000 words ……

… only if someone sees it

 Live or not (definitely live, everything is always in a state of flux, and knowledge is generated every minute) Number of files on your PC keep growing in a live university Why have they not changed for us on the Internet for such a long time?

With so many great thinkers under one roof, there is a lot of what we generate that can be shared

200 Top Universities Webometrics Ranking (January’07)

As academicians, all of us are anxious to get our work published, for all the good reasons You can accomplish much more by making your work public, via the Internet (a demo later will illustrate) If publishing is so important, and publishing on the Internet is easier than chasing publishers, then what is the reason for this delay and inertia? No better way to – Benefit others with your knowledge – Getting cited and tracking your citations What is your weight in the scholarly world? (Will let you answer) (visit and enter site:uqu.edu.sa)

And … now in the age of Internet, everyone of us can be a publisher

The manuscript that is prepared and submitted the first time to the publisher is called a prePrint We have a provision in our university at (KFUPM) to publish prePrints, visit eprints.kfupm.edu.sa It is the property of the organization where the employee worked to generate both the knowledge and the manuscript Only the version that has been reviewed by the publisher, edited by him/her for language (value addition), and printed in the journal after signing of the copyright form is subject to terms of copyright

The entire academic world is sharing knowledge --- why not UQU? Course work & Lecture Notes, Seminars, Project Presentations, Conference Presentations, Theses Presentations, Coop/Summer-Training reports, Submitted papers, White papers, Project reports (progress and final), to name a few can be published on our websites Even rejected papers (Lutfi Zadeh’s initial works) Even our committee reports (non-confidential documents) are good study documents for the world to benefit The number of pages on the Internet is growing at the rate of almost 10,000,000 a day

What is our share?

 Best way to attract excellent faculty  Best way to market yourself and your school for collaboration  Easy for aspiring junior faculty to get promoted  On google alone there are over 200 Million search queries per day

Who did people ask before google?

Should the knowledge we generate be a part of the response?

 Institutional Policies ◦ You can recommend  Ownership – University’s  Enforcing /Incentivizing Web publications (how?)  Funding  Promotion of candidates  Annual Evaluation  Teaching Evaluation

 Policies ◦ Research committee  All conference papers submitted for support must have full searchable text files on the faculty’s website  Previous publications must also be available to support  Project reports (if support is from research project)  PowerPoint presentation to be made must also be available  A website for each project approved (sample)

 Policies ◦ Dossier on the web ◦ Preprints of all journal/conference publications and technical reports: (a separate section for 5 selected publications) ◦ No communication with the candidate except via the website  he updates whenever he wills  Reviewers do not get printed material, nor do the committee members

 Policies ◦ Last two years publications on the website ◦ Also: All  teaching material on the website  project reports on the web  patent documents on the web  committee reports on the web ◦ Any other supporting documents that can be made public or will help enhance the image of the university

 SiteMaps (for all sites, and updated)  Make sure the crawlers visit your site and pick pages (Webmaster tools)  Training (many do not know that it is simpler than using MSOffice)  Storage and Backup  Updating the web and making sites which are simple to index ◦ No frame for example ◦ No big size pages  Generating Templates for Faculty Pages and Departmental Pages  Easily Uploadable Tools for Rich Files  Make Research Documents Searchable  Contact other organizations for Backlinks (Link exchanges) ◦ Universities worldwide ◦ Local/International Forums (Islamicfinder.org, for example) ◦ Collaborating with google scholar (particularly for material in the library, UQU Journal of Islamic knowledge, etc.)

Improving Umm-Ul-Qura University‘s Web presence Technicalities Sadiq M. Sait Makkah, Saudi Arabia, 19 November 2008

Number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are normalised to 1 for the highest value. Then for each domain, maximum and minimum results are excluded and every institution is assigned a rank according to the combined sum (37,900) In google, enter site:uqu.edu.sa 10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects25

The total number of unique external links received (inlinks) by a site can be only confidently obtained from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead. For each engine, results are normalised to 1 for the highest value and then combined to generate the rank (10,500 for UQU, 14 from domain:edu) In yahoo.com, enter linkdomain:uqu.edu.sa -site:uqu.edu.sa 10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects26

After evaluation of their relevance to academic and publication activities and considering the volume of the different file formats, the following were selected: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt). These data are extracted using Google. site:kfupm.edu.sa filetype:pdf 10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects27

Google Scholar provides the number of papers and citations for each academic domain. These results from the Scholar database represent papers, reports and other academic items (55 for UQU). site:uqu.edu.sa 10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects28

=4*RankV+2*RankS+1*RankR+1*RankSc 10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects29

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 Content is the key: o Visibility is measured by the number of external in-links  Quantity, diversity, organization, freshness and originality of the contents increase the number of visits  Visitors are candidate web authors for linking visited pages  Google’s Page Rank: Ranking algorithm combining visibility and web pages importance.  Portals and directories transfer high PR to website listed on them o Rich formats are usually reserved to the quality information, including scientific papers  Web archiving own or hosted documents increases the impact of the websites: Open Access initiatives, self-archiving, institutional or thematic repositories o Popularity refers to the visits received by the website  Number, origin and behavior of the visitors should be monitored in any web strategy project

Barriers to crawlers – Hostile design Flash without embedded links Javascripts/Java with incomplete URLs – Orphaned pages (not linked from others) (Open Directory Listing) Invisible Web – Gateways to databases without categories – Dynamic pages with long URLs Lazy Webmasters – “Dead” links, Irregular Contents update, No title or META, bad URLs, few alternative formats (pdf, ppt, doc, ps)

INSTITUTIONAL LINKING DEEP LINKING HIGH PAGERANK YAHOO ODP WIKIPEDIA UNIVERSITIES VERTICAL PORTALS KFUPM.EDU.SA

 Web is becoming more important for academic institutions  Web contents are easier to publish, cheaper to distribute and they reach far larger audiences  Scholars still are not prone to publish on the Web, but in the meantime US universities are providing A LOT of info on their websites  Web success is related to the volume and quality of the information provided  Web visibility and impact is correlated with the institution overall performance

 Middle and Long term strategies ◦ Open access mandatory ◦ Vertical initiatives: From personal to institutional repositories ◦ Horizontal initiatives: Libraries!  Increase web cooperation with other academic institutions of the country and the region ◦ Exchange links ◦ Cooperative repositories  Develop web positioning policies  Open/distance learning initiatives  Exploit the future: Building broadband and multimedia repositories

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10/22/2015ITC Services & Projects69 Thank you