Stevan Harnad, ROAR to DOAR, Open Access Archivangelism, January 29, 2006. Comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). Excerpt:
DOAR is mostly just re-doing, funded, what Tim [Brody] had already done, unfunded (with ROAR). DOAR so far covers about 3/5 of the archives in ROAR and 1/2 the number in OAIster, and does not yet measure or provide a way to display the time-course of their growth in contents or number, as ROAR does. (DOAR will need Tim's Celestial to do that.)
However, DOAR does provide an OAI Base URL in what looks (to my eyes: DOAR does not yet give tallies) to be a much larger proportion of archives than ROAR does (c. 80%), and this is presumably because DOAR has directly contacted each archive individually for which the OAI Base URL was missing.
(This is...perhaps too much to expect from an unfunded doctoral student, primarily working on his thesis! The solution of course is for archives to expose their own OAI Base URLs for harvesters to pick up automatically, and this will of course be the ultimate outcome. For now, there is no Registry that all archives use or aspire to be covered by. If DOAR incorporates all of the useful features of ROAR (especially celestial), and adds value, it may succeed in becoming that Registry. So far, ROAR's periodic calls to Archives to register have insufficient success. Most of ROAR's new archives for the past year or more have been hand-imported by me and Tim! At least DOAR will be funded to do that thankless task, from now on!)
The second potentially useful feature of DOAR is that it seems to classify separately the different content types and (I think -- I'm not sure) that DOAR has checked that those are all full-texts (rather than just bibiographic metadata: DOAR will have to make this more explicit in their documentation)....
Right now, the DOAR entry for an archive looks a lot like a library card catalogue entry for a journal or a book (perhaps by analogy with DOAJ) or even a collection. This does not quite make sense to me, since users do not consult or use individual online institutional archives as they do for individual books or journals or collections. For one thing, most of the archives will be university IRs. Most universities produce contents of all of the types listed, and in all of the subjects listed; and rarely will any user want all/only, say, articles on subject X from individual institution Y: They will instead use an OAI harvester and service-provider like OAIster or citebase or citeseer or even google scholar, that searches across all institutions on that subject, or even all subjects.
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.
