As part of the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 held in Baltimore Maryland from 17-18 November 2008, DRF (Japan) and DRIVER have agreed to work closely together on promoting federated repository infrastructures....
DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories.
Digital Repository Federation (DRF) is a federation consisting of 86 universities and research institutes which aims to promote Open Access and Institutional Repository development in Japan. Under the auspices of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, DRF is a collaborative program for institutional repositories, based on one of the research and development projects of the national framework of Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI).
DRF and DRIVER share the vision that the Open Access movement in Europe and in Japan contribute to better scholarly communication in the world; and that each should contribute actively and cooperatively to a global, interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure based on Open Access digital repositories.
Collaboration between DRF (Japan) and DRIVER is framed by their joint support for an Open Access model for repositories in research and higher education institutions. They present a common strategy to enable research libraries - pressed to improve scholarly communication by establishing digital repositories - to expose institutional research outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, share and re-use are being built on the basis of institutional, national and regional location, or by subject areas....
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.
