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 >