The Cybermetrics Lab released today the 12th edition of its Ranking Web of Universities. This is the world broadest coverage ranking of Universities showing the performance of 12,000 higher education institutions worldwide. The Ranking is freely available: http://www.webometrics.info/ This January 2011 edition's introduces new improved features including an updated Directory, more national and regional Rankings and recalculated indicators for better reflecting academic impact of the universities’ web presence. Focusing not only on the research dimension, but considering also other academic missions like teaching, community engagement and knowledge and technological transfer, the Ranking Web is offering a series of truly global indicators that reveal the outstanding performers, the excellence in education and the international impact and visibility of the universities. The main results from the current edition are: • US dominance: The Ranking is headed by MIT and Harvard University, followed by Stanford and California Berkeley. There are 115 North American universities among the Top 200, including 16 Canadian ones. • Academic Digital Divide. The concerning gap between US and the Developed World Universities is not being closed. Only 59 European institutions are cited in the Top 200, including 10 UK ones, mostly in the leading group (Cambridge and University College of London are the EU best ones) • Language barriers. The globalization of the Web penalized the international visibility of French, Japanese or Korean universities. Australian, Scandinavian, Singapore and surprisingly Taiwanese institutions show a performance close to the Canadian universities. • Size is a relevant factor in the emerging countries. Sao Paulo in Brazil, UNAM in México and Peking and Tsinghua in China are examples to be considered. None Indian university appears in top 500. • Open Access policies. The scores show that many universities are launching big efforts to populate their repositories, greatly expanding the availability of academic papers. On the contrary, there are still a few hundred institutions with two or more web domains, a bad practice that penalizes not only their rank but their overall visibility in search engines. "In this edition a new indicator has been applied for reflecting more accurately the academic impact of the web contents" said Isidro F. Aguillo, Head of the Cybermetrics Lab. "The goal is to provide a complete overview of the academia worldwide, without using subjective criteria or excluding universities solely by technical reasons and guaranteeing no economical or political interests affect the scores". “We are very surprised by the use of incomplete or flawed rankings for recognition of foreign university degrees. The current report constitutes a robust evaluation resource that can useful worldwide" said Isidro Aguillo. About The Cybermetrics Lab The Cybermetrics Lab is a research group devoted to Science Evaluation by means of analysis, visualization and evaluation of the information published in the public Web. The Cybermetrics Lab belongs to the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), the largest scientific public body in Spain and one of the most important networks of research centers in Europe. The Cybermetrics Lab publishes several scientific information portals including the Webometrics Rankings of Research centers (research.webometrics.info), Hospitals (hospitals.webometrics.info), Business Schools (business-schools.webometrics.info) and Repositories (repositories.webometrics.info). About the Webometrics Project The Webometrics Rankings are published since 2004, analyzing more than 45.000 academic and research organizations from all over the world. About 20.000 Higher Education Institutions are included in the Catalogue of Universities that is probably the largest and the most updated (a new edition appears every January & July) world directory of academic web domains. Media Contact Isidro F. Aguillo, HcDr Head, The Cybermetrics Lab Email: isidro.aguillo@cchs.csic.es