Our subject repository (Ivy Academic Search) is an open access search portal for a specific subject area that provides users with metadata for scientific content and directs them to the full text documents that match their search results. The results are collected from a variety of academic repositories and from PubMed Central, as well as relevant journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This selection process is called “harvesting”. With a so-called harvester system, we are able to send digital requests to other repositories and they can send us all of their relevant data for indexing in our subject repository.
Current Ivy Academic Search participants include: PubMed Central, DOAJ, Wageningen Yield, RIVM, Ghent University, Queensland University, Glasgow University, OpenMed, University of Melbourne, University of Zürich and, of course, Utrecht University.
Are other organizations also working on subject repositories?
Ivy Academic Search is not the first subject repository in the world. Tilburg University has Economists Online and many people may know arXiv, the subject repository for Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics, which is run by Cornell University in the US. The main difference between our subject repository and, for example arXiv, is that Ivy Academic search simply collects and offers metadata, while they have a...deposit function. We help the user locate a document by indexing it in our records and then direct the searcher to the full text, which is located in the home repository. This means that authors must deposit their full text articles in their own academic repository....
What was your biggest challenge?
...[W]e discovered that some academic repositories do not yet adhere to the standards of Open Access. In addition, some of the academic repositories we encountered contained a very small amount of content or content that was poorly organized. This means, for example, that not every article was accompanied by the required structuring data such as: author, source title, publication year, abstract, keywords, etc. Due to the relatively poor standard of the general bibliographic data, we decided to develop a basic search system. If things improve over time, we can always refine the search facility.
The biggest eye opener was the current status of academic repositories; this subject is not on all academic agendas yet! Repositories are not all filled with the most recent articles and many articles are not archived Open Access. But the world is changing fast, so we expect to connect to more repositories in the future, which is an ongoing process. Actually, this growth should never stop....
[M]ore and more institutions need to understand the importance of Open Access and to embed the use of repositories in their daily lives.
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.
