Please Register All OA Institutional Archives

[Stevan Harnad]

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, Mike Gardner wrote:

> http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl
> http://software.eprints.org/archives.php
> http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=3Dbrowse
> 
> Wouldn't it be clever if some of these lists could be automatically
> generated from one master list (eg the OAI one) ?

It would be clever -- if there were a master list, and all the archives
were in it, but there isn't one. 
OAI http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl
in fact contains fewer archives (147) than the Institutional Archives Registry
http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php?action=3Dbrowse  
which contains 192. OAIster has still more (277)
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
but many are not for eprints (preprints, postprints, theses)
and UIUC http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/
has the most (531) but they are not all active, and many are not 
for eprints.

The Institutional Archives Registry is focussed specifically on eprints
(preprints, postprints, theses) in universities and research institutions
worldwide.

The cleverest would of course be if archives didn't have to be registered
at all, but were simply harvested. Celestial http://celestial.eprints.org/
does this to a certain extent, but it still has not managed to find all
of them. An OAI-compliant-Archive Harvester will certainly come, once
there are more archives, with more content. That's the priority right now.

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
        To join the Forum: 
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to: 
    american-scientist-open-access-forum at amsci.org
        Hypermail Archive: 
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
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