A new service is
being developed 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.
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 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.
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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 here.
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