Re: Newly enhanced Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

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

              ** Apologies for Cross-Posting **

For researchers or OA advocates (or detractors!) who are interested in the
current state, growth rate and distribution of Open Access Repositories
(or Archives) worldwide, ROAR

     http://archives.eprints.org/

the Registry of Open Access Repositories (created by Southampton 
doctoral student Tim Brody as part of his thesis, and for the 
Eprints and jOpCit projects) allows anyone to generate growth 
charts by archive type, or by individual archive. It can also 
rank-order archives by the number of OAI records they currently 
contain (i.e., their size)

ROAR is a gold-mine of current, cumulating data, ripe for anyone 
enterprising enough to want to report an up-to-date quantitative 
analysis of how OA IRs are progressing today, and where.

I also take this opportunity to remind all OA Archives and OA IRs 
to please *register* with ROAR so you too can be counted, and 
your content growth tracked.

     http://archives.eprints.org/index.php?action=add

The size and growth data are classified by the type of Archive:

      (i) Distributed Institutional/Departmental Pre-/Postprint Archives (275),
      (ii) Central Cross-Research Archives (69)
      (iii) Dissertation Archives (e-theses) (62)

  as well as

      (iv) database Archives (e.g. research data) (10)
      (v) e-journal/e-publishing Archives (53)
      (vi) demonstration Archives (not yet operational) (24)
      (vii) "other" Archives (non-OA content of various kinds) (79)

The archives can also be classified by country, and by the software
they use.

One caveat: The number of OAI records does not necessarily 
correspond to the actual number of full-text articles or 
dissertations in the IR!

For many archives the records are still only the metadata 
(author, title, etc.), not the full-texts themselves. ROAR will 
soon have a way of counting only full-texts, separately.

Meanwhile, contents will have to be sampled to estimate what 
percentage of the records are just metadata and what percentage 
are full-texts. (Some of the central archives are full-text only, 
and many of the advanced institutional archives, especially the 
ones with self-archiving mandates, are also mostly full-text.)

Even among full-texts, not all may be OA's target contents 
(journal article postprints and preprints plus dissertations). 
They may be documents of other kinds (teaching materials, 
multimedia, "gray literature," even administrative records). ROAR 
does not register archives that *only* contain metadata; among 
archive types (i)-(iii), ROAR also does not register archives 
that do not target OA content -- preprints, postprints, theses -- 
at all.

     Prior Amsci Topic Thread:

     Newly enhanced Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) (June, 2005)
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4586.html

Stevan Harnad