BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories"

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002) "To achieve open access to scholarly journal literature, we recommend two complementary strategies. I. Self-Archiving: First, scholars need the tools and assistance to deposit their refereed journal articles in open electronic archives, a practice commonly called, self-archiving. When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. II. Open-access Journals: Second, scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access… "

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Berlin Declaration (Oct 2003) "Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions: […] 2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving."

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Early days of repositories  origins in academics' desire to disseminate papers  early archives subject-based –e.g. arXiv (physics, 1991-), RePEc (economics, 1993-), CogPrints (cognitive science, 1997-)  Open Archives Initiative –interoperable metadata harvesting standard (OAI-PMH)  development of OAI-compliant Open Source repository software platforms  concept of institutional repositories emerged

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Technology platforms  Open Source –e.g. Eprints (Southampton, 2000), DSpace (MIT, 2002), Fedora (Cornell/Virginia, 2003) –local customisation –international community development –software “free” but hidden development costs  proprietary –e.g. bepress (Berkeley), Digitools (Ex Libris) –dependence on commercial vendor –loss of local control/flexibility –costs more explicit  hybrid –e.g. BMC Open Repository (commercial hosted DSpace service)

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Progress to date Directory of Open Access Repositories, a.k.a. “OpenDOAR” ( at 26/1/07:  838 registered repositories in 44 countries  67 contain "Health & Medicine" collections  USA: 250 repositories  Europe: 410 repositories in 23 countries  UK: 93 repositories  ac.uk  20 other (.org,.com,.gov,.net,.bl.uk.,.nhs.uk,.eu)

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Four key repository functions  submission –self-archiving by author, or mediated deposit  indexing –each object is assigned metadata (descriptive, technical, administrative)  dissemination –content is identifiable and retrievable via OAI-PMH and a range of search engines  preservation –content remains usable over time (file migration, persistent identifiers)

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Organisational policy questions  institutional (e.g. university) or subject (e.g. UK PubMed Central)?  types of content (papers, theses, images, data, etc.?)  types of activity? (research, teaching, admin?)  file formats? (exclusions? single/complex?)  quality control? (metadata? suitability?)  storage capacity? (rationing? scalability?)  who owns/manages IPR? ( ©,, RoMEO)  mandated or voluntary deposit?  open or closed access? (embargo? Open Data?)

BMC Open Access Colloquium, 8 February Morgan: "Open Access Repositories" Thank you Peter Morgan