Abstract

This work presents the results of a study of web sites of 230 OA digital repositories in 16 European countries. The analysis addresses the extent to which these repositories fulfil display characteristics of quality sites, over and above the quality of their content. The objective of this study is to verify whether web sites specifically committed to free access to information satisfy the quality criteria of accessibility, web positioning and quality of the source code. The results obtained find that accessibility must be improved upon, source code quality is merely acceptable, and web positioning is good. In short, bad practices were observed that should not occur in sites whose objective is to facilitate the free access to information.