Abstract: At its 2005 business meeting in Oslo, the Health and Biosciences Libraries Section (HBLS) agreed that an international directory of institutional repositories would be a useful tool for IFLA. Members suggested that it could be mined and monitored for growth in numbers of repositories, their collections and content development, the services they provide, their acceptance and use by scholars, and their impact on scholarship. With that in mind, HBLS funded Johns Hopkins to 1) identify existing directories, and, for those found, 2) to describe their scope, record structure and updating mechanisms. In this paper, we will describe the results of our research. One directory, the University of Nottingham’s OpenDOAR, stands out as the leader among the directories identified, particularly for the purposes envisioned at the Section’s 2005 business meeting. This paper will describe and compare the scope, structure and update methodology of OpenDOAR and 23 other directories of institutional repositories, with particular attention to the health sciences. Based on our findings, we will offer suggestions for how the HBLS and IFLA might support an international directory of institutional repositories and how such a directory might be used for the advancement of scholarship globally.
Comment. The abstract suggests that, although HBLS likes OpenDOAR, it might launch yet another directory of OA repositories. But the body of the paper suggests that HBLS is more likely to support OpenDOAR than launch a new one --which is good news. We don't need another directory. We need to merge the best ones (OpenDOAR and ROAR), avoid the present duplication of labor and resources, persuade existing repositories to list themselves, and support the merged result.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/25/2006 08:28:00 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.
