New Features in May 2006

OAI-Compliance

ROAR is now OAI compliant http://archives.eprints.org/oai.php. These are the ROAR records (and not their content), available initially as Dublin Core.

This is in addition to the RSS, plain-text and ListFriends exports.

Preservation Format Profiling

As part of the Preserv project (http://preserv.eprints.org) we have added support for Content Profiling institutional repositories. Currently this is available for most GNU EPrints and DSpace repositories. If a repository has a functioning (and registered) OAI interface the profile can be obtained by clicking the Preserv Profile link.

Using the UK National Archive's Pronom tool ROAR identifies the file format of every full-text in the repository. The IR administrator (or interested user) can then generate a summary graph of all the identified formats and, by clicking a format's red bar, obtain a complete listing of those identified records.

For more information on content profiling and how you can enable your repository to support this see http://trac.eprints.org/projects/iar/wiki/Profile.

Calling all Repository Developers!

If you're a repository administrator you can register your repository by going to http://archives.eprints.org/?action=add (don't forget to include your OAI-PMH base URL!).

If you're a repository software developer you might be interested in using the ROAR to publicise your software by 1) have your software added to the taxonomy (if not already), 2) registering your installations and/or 3) using the plain-text listing with a filter to brand the listing using your own corporate style. Contact Tim Brody tdb01r@ecs.soton.ac.uk for more information.

About the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

We are promoting open access to the research literature pre- and post-peer-review through author self-archiving in institutional eprint archives. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective.

ROAR has two functions: (1) to monitor overall growth in the number of eprint archives and (2) to maintain a list of GNU EPrints sites (the software Southampton University has designed to facilitate self-archiving).