Fwd: Registry of Open Access Repositories upgraded

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

** Forwarded Message Cross-Posted **

From: Leslie Carr <lac -- ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: January 8, 2010 8:34:53 AM EST (CA)
To: JISC-REPOSITORIES -- JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Registry of Open Access Repositories upgraded

An upgraded version of the ROAR service http://roar.eprints.org/ 
has been debuted, thanks to recent JISC funding shared jointly 
between ROAR and OpenDOAR.

The Registry of Open Access Repositories, which provides the open 
access community with quantitative analyses of open access 
repositories across the world, has now been reworked as a 
repository itself. Collecting, updating and editing information 
about open access repositories is now part of a familiar 
repository workflow, and consequently much easier to handle. Open 
access repository managers can register for a ROAR account to 
enter and update information about their own repositories. We 
hope that the improved facilities will result in better quality 
information and an improved service for all stakeholders.

Built on top of the information acquisition, storage and 
dissemination facilities of the EPrints repository platform, ROAR 
provides the following familiar features:

  - Cataloguing individual repositories and their attributes
  - Easy addition of information about new repositories
  - The option to share new repository information with OpenDOAR
  - Listing repositories by location, purpose and software platform
  - Analyses of the growth over time of individual repositories or
    groups of repositories
  - Searching for repositories by various properties
  - Searching the contents of groups of repositories using a Google
    Customised Search
  - Access to the OAI-PMH data obtained from the Celestial harvester

Repository platforms have matured greatly in recent years, adapting
to the challenge of managing a wide range of research outputs, data
and different forms of scholarly material. It seems only appropriate
that information about the repository community should itself be
held in a repository, allowing for easier update,  flexible
dissemination and improved sharing with other registry services such
as OpenDOAR.

Les Carr & Tim Brody
Registry of Open Access Repositories