U-multirank – The European alternative
An update on U-Multirank: “a multi-dimensional global university ranking”. This is a European Commission-funded feasibility study into developing an alternative approach to rankings:
The objective of the project is to develop a feasible transparency instrument that can contribute to enhancing the transparency of institutional and programmatic diversity of European higher education in a global context and test its feasibility. The general intention is to create a transparency instrument that will have a global outreach, potentially covering higher education institutions of all continents.
A huge amount of effort seems to be going into the project and there are lots of credible partners in the consortium. The outcome of the study will be published in June. Whether it will take off remains to be seen. And we will also have to wait to discover whether anyone will be able adequately to explain what a ‘transparency instrument’ is.
Registrarism 
An alternative european ranking based on publicly available CORDIS data using funding and networking performance as indicators can be found at researchranking.org