Open Access Archiving
Status Report 2007
Peter Suber:
"Green OA, or OA archiving, put down deeper roots in 2007, entirely apart from policies to encourage or require it and apart from the launch of individual new repositories. Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK spent public funds to create OA repositories at their universities. Ireland committed public funds to establish OA repositories at all its universities. In addition to supporting individual repositories, the UK used public funds to launch the Depot, a universal OA repository for UK researchers. New Zealand and Sweden launched services to harvest their institutional repositories. Australia established a registry for the nation's repositories. Germany created OA-Netzwerk to spread best practices to the national network of OA repositories. The EU's DRIVER project expanded in 2007 (after launching in 2006), wrote guidelines to facilitate the harvesting of repositories, and worked with individual repositories to bring them into compliance.
Forums and services to support repository managers proliferated, often with public funding. Managers in the UK had the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) from SHERPA, the Repositories Support Project from JISC, and the EPrints Community from Southampton. Managers in Australia and New Zealand had the AuseAccess wiki from Arthur Sale, the Institutional Repository Community ANZ from Alison Hunter, the ORCA support network, and RUBRIC (Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively) from the Australian government. Those in Germany had OA-Netzwerk from DINI. In Europe, DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) set up a wiki and the Mentor program. OpenDOAR established an e-mail distribution service for sending information or announcements to different sets of OA repository managers, for example by country, language, or software platform. Early in the year, Dorothea Salo, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, launched IR-Managers, one of the only projects not regionally focused and not based on public funds. Unfortunately, it has since shut down.
Repository software and its ecology of supporting tools continued to evolve. ArXiv and OpenDOAR opened their APIs. OpenDOAR added a range of graphs to show the state of the repositories in the directory. OpenDOAR and ROAR took part in mash-ups with mapping services (ROAR with Google Earth, OpenDOAR with Google Maps) showing the worldwide distribution of repositories. ScientificCommons started citation tracking for repository content. India launched a cross-archive search engine for the country's OA repositories. BioMed Central upgraded its Open Repository service to facilitate deposits and customization, convert files, and support RSS feeds. JISC and UKOLN launched SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) to semi-automate deposits in OA repositories. Zotero is adding a feature allowing users to upload public-domain documents to the Zotero Commons, an OA repository within the Internet Archive. The AIRway project and OCLC Openly Informatics described a way to point link resolvers to OA repositories and help researchers find OA copies of articles published in journals to which their institutions do not subscribe. PubMed abstracts by authors from the University of Michigan now link to full text OA editions of the articles in the Michigan repository. Ari Friedman wrote software to scan an online bibliography, check the OA policies of the represented publishers in ROMEO, annotate each entry accordingly, and email the authors to ask if they would self-archive their articles or email copies to a user. At least two different library OPAC packages now integrate library holdings with the contents of the institutional repository. A handful of major reports and full-length books offered guidance on building OA repositories and analyzed the factors driving and inhibiting their growth. The EPrints Community came to the end of its JISC funding and issued its final report. The DSpace community launched the DSpace Foundation and the Fedora community launched the Fedora Commons, both based on significant new funding." (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0011.110)