Open Access

Open access, first suggested more than years ago, is an idea whose time has (almost) come. Increasingly there is pressure from bodies funding research for the record of that research, primarily journal articles, to be made accessible to all. This move is driven (in part) by the moral argument that publicly-funded research should be publicly available, without the need to pay for access.

Many people view it as immoral that research which could benefit the developing world is locked away behind expensive annual subscriptions (printed journals) or pay-to-view web sites (electronic journals). But slowly the publishers’ stranglehold is being eroded and one of the agents of erosion is the institutional repository.

Institutional repositories

Institutional repositories are open databases containing details of the scholarly outputs of educational and research institutions. Institutional repositories are ‘open’, and though you can search repositories from their home pages, most repository traffic comes from the commonly-used search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Bing and Yahoo.

Andrew Barrow
Science Librarian and Keeper of the Institutional Repository (Parade)
University Library 0.23
T: 023 9284 3236
E: andy.barrow@port.ac.uk