Open scholarship ranking of Chinese research universities

Abstract

Universities and the members of their faculties, by means of open access, open education, and social media engagement, contribute to many publicly accessible resources of academic values, i.e., open scholarship. To encourage universities to contribute even more to open scholarship, in a more focused and sustainable way, the methodology of Open Scholarship Ranking (OSR) was constructed after a thorough examination and several adjustments based on the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions (hereinafter referred to as “the Berlin Principles”). The OSR has met most of the Berlin Principles, and new adjustments helped to improve its quality. A significant correlation has been observed between the OSR results of Chinese research universities and the results from existing comprehensive university rankings. The OSR provides an evaluation framework for universities’ performance in open scholarship, and can be regarded as an acceptable way of ranking universities.