Dear Colleagues,

Some comments to Stevans explanations about OpenDOAR:

In general what we would like to accomplish by building the OpenDOAR service is:

1. Make a comprensive overview of repositories with original content – in the OAI terminology: data providers. By original content I mean documents (and later other digital objects) deposited in institutional or subject based repositories. Therefore we do not include for instance journals as such, neither do we include data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). As well we do not include second layer services or collections of links to free resources etc.

2. Make incentives for such repositories to develop their services – e.g. ability to provide metadata sets based on full text or not full text, metadata sets based on subject and document type.

3. Provide services for potential service providers – e.g. libraries, research information support services etc. – to create services based on the contents of the repositories and by means of OAI-harvesting of the various sets of metadata.

I disagree with Stevan: I think that a number of service providers (for instance libraries at research centers or universities) would like to harvest exactly the content of interest for their researchers and students – for instance pre/postprints and dissertations in economics but not thesis in economics etc. A significant proportion of research institutions and universities are not covering all scientific disciplines. Therefore if a service provider wants to integrate open accessible scientific content with toll-access journal content in their service (thus increasing the visibility of the open access content!) a service like OpenDOAR would make a lot of sense and provide a lot of value for end users of those institutions.

Thus the OpenDOAR is not primarily a service for end users but more so for service providers.

The work with OpenDOAR is still in its early stages. So far we have drawn on a number of sources (“lists”) in order to create the very first list, which will be extended in numbers and in functionality in the coming months.

For instance: Based on the stuff in ROAR we could include only a proportion of the sites in ROAR – a number of the sites in ROAR are not original material, there are journals, dead URL s etc.

OAIster as well is a valuable resource, but even OAIster contains sources of various kinds.

We want to make a “clean” service – only first layer repositories (among other other things to reduce duplicates, redundancy etc.) and hopefully inspiring and make incentives for repository managers to offer metadata harvesting on a more detailed level - that is: improving the quality and functionality of repositories.

It is our ambition to add more functionality to OpenDOAR such as the ones Stevan mentions, but even other functionality is in the pipeline.

I agree completely with Stevan on the common cause: to provide genuine value to the OA community and the research community in general. We would like to do that by offering a clean, easy-to-build-on service for service providers.

By the way that is more or less the same strategy we have when it comes to the DOAJ. DOAJ is not primarily an end user service, more so it is a service – and it is primarily used as a service – for service providers. Libraries and commercial aggregators all over the world are (OAI-)harvesting records from the DOAJ into their library catalogues and portals and the commercial aggregators integrates the DOAJ records in their products, thus improving visibility and usage of the Open Access Journals.

So: Green and Gold go hand in hand!

Lars Bj*rnshauge
Director of Libraries
Lund University

Partner in the OpenDOAR service

(sent to JISC-REPOSITORIES by Bill Hubbard)


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