The open access movement is an emerging issue in Spain, but it is becoming a familiar term within the scientific community. It has advanced in the past three or four years with more frequent initiatives related to repositories and open/free journals. The 246 registered signatories of the Berlin Declaration include 21 Spanish institutions, most of which signed it in 2006. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) have in their records 32 and 22 open access repositories from Spain, respectively, but these figures do not represent the real ones, since there are more that have not registered yet ... and others that are listed in those directories which are not repositories but journals or aggregators. The oldest repository in Spain, Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa (‘Networked Doctoral Theses’) was created in year 2001, but most of the Spanish institutional repositories emerged at the end of 2004 or the beginning of 2005 (Melero, 2006). Nevertheless, there is evidence that more have been created and announced in recent months (Melero, 2007). These data do not correlate with the DRIVER I inventory study in which the response of the 12 invited (those registered at that time in OpenDOAR) was very low (3 answers). However, the international presence of our repositories, measured as participations in OA initiatives, is increasing as described below. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/21/2008 12:03:00 AM.
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.
