(options)
UK Open Access repositories: There are 161 Open Access (OA) repositories in the UK. According to OpenDOAR- a directory that lists repositories - there are currently 1490 repositories worldwide. The UK accounts for over 10% of this total.
Research-led OA institutional repositories: Of the 39 research-led universities in the Russell Group and 1994 Group, all have institutional repositories or are developing them.
Funding Policies: Of the 8 government funding agencies in the UK, 6 have OA policies: many other UK funding bodies also have policies. These include the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and the Arthritis Research Campaign. The policies require or encourage that researchers make their material open access. Summaries of these and other research funder’s OA policies are available from the JULIET service.
Institutional Policies/ Declarations: Some institutions are adopting archiving policies for the work of their staff. Other declarations in support of Open Access include the Scottish Declaration on Open Access from Scottish universities, research funders, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Scottish Executive. The Russell Group has publicly declared that they wish to minimise barriers to the dissemination of research output.
Investment: JISC has currently invested £14 million in projects related to Open Access, such as RSP (see below). There have been two previous major funding programmes producing SHERPA, EthOS and many others (see below).
National Support
The
Repositories Support Project (RSP) has a remit to support and actively encourage all Higher Education Institutions to establish institutional repositories.
INTUTE Repository Search is working on a value added search service to promote UK research.
Depot is an interim national repository to serve all researchers while institutional repositories are being set up.
IRI Scotland is a project to link all Scottish Higher Education Institutions’ repository projects.
Wales has a comprehensive support programme for all HEIs as part of the RSP project.
Other Projects
SHERPA : SHERPA is a consortium of 33 universities and is internationally recognised as a leader and advocate for the development of open access institutional repositories and associated services. It has been successful in developing services such as
OpenDOAR,
JULIET ,
ROMEO. For the development of these sevices and its work in enhancing the profile of Open Access both within the UK and internationally, in 2007 SHERPA was awarded
SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. In response to requests from the repository community and with contributions from UKCORR members, SHERPA also released a description of key repository roles and the
Skills Set needed to run a repository.
DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research): The aim of DRIVER is to encourage and support the development of a network of institutional repositories across Europe. The second phase of the project, DRIVER II, began in December 2007 and will last 24 months. In this second phase the focus of DRIVER will move from textual documents to now include complex objects. Also the number of project partners is expanded and work will begin on the development of a Confederation of European Digital Repositories.
EthOS (Electronic Theses on Line Service): The aim of this project was to allow anyone to search for and access the full-text of UK post graduate research theses material.
DART-Europe (Digital Access to Research Theses - Europe): This project explores the creation of a European model for the deposit, discovery, use and long-term care of research theses in an open access environment.
Eprints.org : This is a continuing UK development project providing software for repositories on a global level.
