Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, May 01, 2006

More on Stargate

R. John Robertson, Stargate: Exploring Static Repositories for Small Publishers, Ariadne, April 2006. Excerpt:

With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services. It provides 'an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting'. Nodes in a network using this protocol are 'data providers' or 'service providers'.  Although repository software supporting OAI-PMH is not overly complex, without programming skills or access to technical support, implementing and supporting a repository is not an entirely straightforward task. Static repositories and static repository gateways are a development of the OAI-PMH specification that makes participation in networks of data and service providers even simpler. In essence a static repository is an XML file publicly available online at a persistent address. This file is registered in a static repository gateway which then presents it as a (slightly limited) OAI-PMH data provider.  One community that the static repository approach might benefit is the community of small publishers, particularly those publishers who only produce one or two journals. Such publishers, who may not have dedicated technical support, are less likely to be able to implement and maintain a repository supporting the full OAI-PMH. They might however be able to maintain a static repository, and participate in these wider networks in this way.  This article introduces STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit: Enabling small publishers to participate in OAI-PMH-based services), a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and based in the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, which is undertaking an investigation of the applicability of this technology to small publishers.