OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR is primarily a service to enhance and support the academic and research activities of the global community. OpenDOAR maintains a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories. It also encompasses archives set up by funding agencies like the National Institutes for Health in the USA or the Wellcome Trust in the UK and Europe.

Users of the service are able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures. One key point about OpenDOAR is that this information is of use not only to users wishing to find original research papers but also for third-party service providers, like search engines or alert services, who need easy to use tools for developing tailored search services to suit specific user communities.

The Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham currently provides a suite of SHERPA services & tools for the 'Open Access' community. SHERPA Services compiles and maintains the RoMEO service, which gives summaries of the archiving rights that different publishers allow authors to retain. To complement this, SHERPA Services also runs the JULIET service, which summarises the archiving responsibilities and requirements that funding agencies give as a condition of funding grants. OpenDOAR is the third part of this repository service, listing available open access repositories.