All researchers and academic authors in the UK now have a repository in which to deposit their research papers under terms of open access.The Depot, a national JISC-funded repository based at EDINA in the University of Edinburgh, was launched last month to provide a range of services to support the self-archiving of research papers.
‘The principal purpose of the Depot,’ says Peter Burnhill, director of EDINA, is ‘to allow all UK academics to share in the benefits of open access. If they have an institutional repository, that’s to the good. But up to now they’ve been excluded unless they have an institutional or access to a subject repository.’
The Depot was first conceived solely as a national repository for those authors who did not yet have access to an institutional repository. But, as Peter Burnhill continues, while the Depot does include this function, the thinking developed to something altogether more ambitious: ‘The way we’ve designed the Depot at the reception area is that there’s a redirect service so that if there’s somebody from an institution which has an institutional repository we can redirect them to its front page, so they can take the necessary steps. So it generates content for all institutional repositories.’
This, he says, is the ‘Repository Junction’, a facility within the Depot that allows not only the re-routing of submissions of academic papers and journal articles (e-prints) but also of other educational and research content….
‘But what we’ve done with the Depot is to gear this for the researcher, the academic author who is now persuaded that open access is the way to go… After all, authors want people to read what they write; what they want is recognition. They want to be read, they write to be read and to be recognised.’
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/31/2007 01:05:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.