The Universities of Nottingham (in England) and Lund (in Sweden) have announced that they are developing the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR). From the web site: 'A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information. DOAR will provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies - like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe. Users of the service will be able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures. This will be of use both to users wishing to find original research papers and for third-party "service providers", like search engines or alert services, which need easy to use tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user communities. The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and the University of Lund in Sweden. Both institutions are active in supporting Open Access development. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is known throughout the world. Nottingham leads SHERPA, an institutional repository project that has helped establish Open Access archives in 20 of the leading UK research universities. Nottingham also runs the SHERPA/RoMEO database, which is used worldwide as a reference for publisher's copyright policies.'
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.
