Bill Hubbard wrote:
> A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging
> movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service,
> called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise
> and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown
> up around the world.
> http://www.opendoar.org
A Directory of Open Access Repositories is certainly a good idea --
except that one already exists since February 2004 -- one that not only
lists repositories (279 registered to date) but tracks the growth in
both their numbers and the size of the contents of each across time:
Institutional Archives Registry
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=browse
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3507.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3715.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4301.html
I posted this a month before that Registry was launched, in January
2004, along with an offer to collaborate, to each of the 3 other services
involved:
DOAJ, OAIster and Romeo should chart growth, as EPrints does
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3495.html
OAIster indexes about 126 more repositories (total 405)
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
The OAI Registry at UIUC lists 646 repositories.
http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/
Is it really best for OA progress to keep independently re-inventing the wheel,
rather than building on what we already have?
Stevan Harnad
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Peter Suber wrote:
> [Forwarding from Bill Hubbard. --Peter.]
>
> A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging
> movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service,
> called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise
> and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown
> up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2
> years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide
> open access to research information.
>
> DOAR will provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional
> and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding
> agencies - like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the
> Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe. Users of the service will be able to
> analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other
> measures. This will be of use both to users wishing to find original
> research papers in specific repositories and for third-party "service
> providers", like search engines or alert services, which need easy to use
> tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user
> communities.
>
> The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham
> in the UK and the University of Lund in Sweden. Both institutions are
> active in supporting Open Access development. Lund operates the Directory
> of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is known throughout the world.
> Nottingham leads SHERPA, an institutional repository project that has
> helped establish Open Access archives in 20 of the leading UK research
> universities. Nottingham also runs the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which is used
> worldwide as a reference for publisher's copyright policies.
>
> The importance and widespread support for the project can be seen in its
> funders, led by the Open Society Institute (OSI), along with the Joint
> Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Consortium of Research Libraries
> (CURL) and SPARCEurope.
>
> More information on the project is available on the project website -
> http://www.opendoar.org
>
> * * * *
>
> Bill Hubbard
> SHERPA Project Manager
> www.sherpa.ac.uk
>
> IS Divisional Office,
> Hallward Library,
> University of Nottingham,
> University Park,
> Nottingham.
> NG7 2RD
> tel: (0115) 846 7657
> fax: (0115) 951 4558
>
Received on Tue Feb 15 2005 - 13:57:43 GMT