From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 15:18:28 +0100

In October 1999 a group of people met in New Mexico to discuss ways in
which the growing number of “eprint archives” could co-operate.

Dubbed the Santa Fe Convention, the meeting was a response to a new
trend: researchers had begun to create subject-based electronic
archives so that they could share their research papers with one
another over the Internet. Early examples were arXiv, CogPrints and
RePEc.

The thinking behind the meeting was that if these distributed archives
were made interoperable they would not only be more useful to the
communities that created them, but they could “contribute to the
creation of a more effective scholarly communication mechanism.”

With this end in mind it was decided to launch the Open Archives
Initiative (OAI) and to develop a new machine-based protocol for
sharing metadata. This would enable third party providers to harvest
the metadata in archives and build new services on top of them.
Critically, by aggregating the metadata these services would be able
to provide a single search interface to enable scholars interrogate
the complete universe of eprint archives as if a single archive. Thus
was born the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH).

Today eprint archives are more commonly known as open access
repositories, and while OAI-PMH remains the standard for exposing
repository metadata, the nature, scope and function of scholarly
archives has broadened somewhat. As well as subject repositories like
arXiv and PubMed Central, for instance, there are now thousands of
institutional repositories. Importantly, these repositories have
become the primary mechanism for providing green open access — i.e.
making publicly-funded research papers freely available on the
Internet. Currently OpenDOAR lists over 3,600 OA repositories.

Fifteen years later, however, the task embarked upon at Santa Fe still
remains a work in progress. Not only has it proved hugely difficult to
persuade many researchers to make use of repositories, but the full
potential of networking them has yet to be realised. As a consequence,
locating and accessing content in OA repositories remains a hit and
miss affair, and while many researchers now turn to Google and Google
Scholar when looking for research papers, Google Scholar has not been
as receptive to indexing repository collections as OA advocates had
hoped.

Problems of getting content into these repositories aside, what is the
current state of the repository infrastructure, particularly with
regard to interoperability and discoverability. Why, for instance, do
many repositories not expose adequate metadata?  Why do they sometimes
provide just the metadata and not the full text? When will the
sophisticated search functionality that researchers need become
standard in repositories? Will it? And what new developments might
help here? More generally, what does the future hold for the OA
repository?

Who better to put these questions to than Kathleen Shearer, Executive
Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)?
Launched in October 2009, COAR’s mission is to “enhance the visibility
and application of research outputs through a global network of open
access digital repositories” and its membership currently includes
over 100 institutions from around the world.

The interview with Kathleen Shearer can be read here:
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/interview-with-kathleen-shearer.html

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