Researchers increasingly depend on open access to information as amounts of data increases exponentially. Digital Repositories (DR) enable access to the new knowledge base and encourages use of scientific content in a standardized, open way. As scientific research groups show signs of increased adoption, government agencies and other sectors such as the humanities are starting to plug into such repositories....
The OGF-Europe Community Outreach Seminar at OGF23 explored DRs from diverse perspectives, bringing valuable insight into domain requirements, user case studies and best practices. Special emphasis was placed on best practices, interoperability, standardization and funding for such repositories....
Metadata, audit trails (provenance), versioning, data life cycle have been largely discarded by the community because they have been viewed to be too domain specific, whereas a number of communities actually share the same requirements. This gap could be bridged if universal terms of reference were used by the various communities to enable them to meet on a common ground....
Several talks demonstrated the value of grid for DRs but how they can benefit from the computational grid remains an open question. Some examples cited include large-scale migration efforts, analysis of primary data managed by repositories, linking publications and primary data and workflows, though these examples should be backed up with fully-fledged use cases. Systems stemming from the grid community are increasingly providing some repository functionality, such as gCube, the D4Science project, and iRODS, while repository systems are assuming "grid-like" functionalities, with Fedora performing journaling and making plans for replication....
However, one message is clear: it is vital that for DRs to flourish, they must contain reliable information, be sensitive to user-community needs and be interoperable. ?This is a hugely important area that is only going to become more important as time goes on....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2008 12:17:00 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.
