Welcome to the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) Wiki

About the 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.

This registry 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).

For more information and common questions about the registry see Frequently Asked Questions. If you would like to register an archive and be able to later edit the record yourself you will need to register to enable self-editing. Lastly if this list isn't big enough for you (!) you can find more archives from the List of Archive Listings.

Tim Brody tdb01r@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Quick Help

  1. Enter any term in the box and press Search to perform a free-text search over all records. The search engine supports common boolean constructs AND OR etc.
  2. The main menu provides links to the search pages. Search searches ROAR and Content Search provides access to a Google Custom Search for searching repository content.
  3. The filter bar provides drop-down lists for ROAR's predefined vocabularies (countries, repository software and repository type). In a Javascript-enabled browser selecting an item from the drop-down lists will filter ROAR using that term. The filter bar adapts to the available filters, showing only those matching repositories in each drop-down e.g. if you change the country to US the number of repositories shown in the other two drop-downs will be only those based in the US. The last drop-down allows the results to be ordered by one of 6 rankings. See Activity for a description of activity-rankings.
  4. The Total Records link will generate a graph of records over time for all repositories in the current data set.
  5. The Document Formats link will generate a file format profile for all repositories in the current data set.
  6. The Tab-Separated Format link will export all of the current repositories in CSV format (suitable for Excel).
  7. Each repository record shows the total number of Dublin Core records after the repository name.
  8. The metadata stored by ROAR is shown in a block. Clicking the total records link will generate a breakdown of records by month.
  9. If the repository has a description it is shown below.
  10. The left-hand image is a thumbnail screenshot of the home page (if available). Clicking the image will take you to the repository's home page.
  11. The right-hand image shows the number of records deposited in the repository over the last 6 years. See repository activity.

Features

Mini-FAQ

What dictates size/ranking for each repository? What does the ranking process involve?

The 'size' of repositories is based on the total number of Dublin Core records exported via the repository's OAI-PMH interface. (Records may not contain a full-text!)

Why do you rank repositories?

We want to encourage both the setting up, but more importantly, the filling of repositories. While we can't (easily) track the number of open access full-texts, the next best thing we can do is to track the number of records. In order to encourage the filling of repositories we need to know how much stuff there is in them.

Why was the registry created?

It was created to better manage the listing of GNU EPrints repositories (http://software.eprints.org/), but has grown to be a general registry of open access repositories. It now tracks the size, growth and type of content (for some repository softwares).

How long has the registry been online?

ROAR was started in 2004 (originally called the Institutional Archives Registry) but it was derived from the GNU EPrints listing that has been around longer. Since then the UIUC registry of OAI-PMH repositories has been created (http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/), the OpenDOAR project (http://www.opendoar.org/) and most recently Openarchives.eu (http://www.openarchives.eu/). So ROAR is now one among many.

Attachments