Start of the DOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) project

[Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>]

Forwarded; of possible interest.
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From: owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk
[owner-boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Peter Suber
Sent: 15 February 2005 14:42
To: SPARC-OAForum@arl.org; boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Subject: [BOAI] Start of the DOAR project

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 in specific repositories 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 importance and widespread support for the project can be seen in its
funders, led by the Open Society Institute (OSI), along with the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Consortium of Research Libraries
(CURL) and SPARCEurope.

More information on the project is available on the project website - 
http://www.opendoar.org