The IREL-Open project has now officially launched. (Thanks to OA@OCD.) From the site:
Irish universities have received government funding to build open access institutional repositories in each Irish university and to develop a federated harvesting and discovery service via a national portal. It is intended that this collaboration will be expanded to embrace all Irish research institutions in the future.
This is a three-year project starting in April 2007, directed by the Irish Universities Association and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. An official statement on the project from the Irish Universities Association Librarian's Group [June 2007] is available here.
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.
