Since 2002, the UK's JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) has shown a strong commitment to an emerging trend in research institutions and digital repositories. This commitment has been reflected in its Digital Repositories Programme as well as a £14m investment in the Repositories and Preservation strand of its Capital Programme.
Repositories are digital stores that manage and provide access to resources and metadata. They come in many shapes and sizes: subject repositories, both national and international; data archives and data centres; learning object repositories; digital libraries; and institutional eprint repositories. According to the OpenDOAR directory, around 50 of the UK's 200 higher education institutions already have institutional and/or department repositories.
This growing role of repositories in UK research and education is reflected in the 25 projects that make up JISC's Digital Repositories Programme. This programme which aims to enable institutions to make better use of repositories across research, teaching, information and administration....
Delivering on these visions for an interoperating infrastructure of repositories and services is no easy task, but the work that has been and is being done by the wide range of JISC-funded projects is already having an impact and this is set to continue. The UK repositories search service, for example, will offer a single access-point to search repositories across the UK. And the EPrints metadata application profile, backed by the Digital Repositories support team, will enable the service to offer a much richer set of search features. What's more, many projects will begin over the next three years, offering new tools and mechanisms to support widespread open access to resources....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2006 02:13:00 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.
