Opendoar-A champion of open access repositories in the world

Abstract

The onset of e-publishing technologies including multimedia authoring, web page designing and related hosting facilities and access tools in the web environment has brought about a significant impact on the libraries i.e. creation of Digital Library. The open access movement was triggered by the journal crisis due to exorbitant price increase in the publications. During the 1990s several e-print archives as well as a few hundred peer reviewed, electronic, scholarly journals emerged. Open access movement is a worldwide effort to provide free online access to scholarly literature like peer reviewed journal articles and preprints. Digital repositories are developing rapidly as a key element of research cyber infrastructure. These include all collected resources in all formats especially contributions from home institutional published and unpublished and is accessible to end users both within and outside of the institution. By 2003, there was a tremendous growth in the Open access research archives in the world in accordance to open access movement. There was need for listing registry of such repositories in order to make them visible to the world of academicians and researchers. A repository registry is a web based metadata catalog that points to repositories. There were several listings of repositories and open access arcives, but there was no single comprehensive list which recorded all the available repositories. Repositories needed to be categorised with clear information on subject coverage, their collection, the content and preservation policies etc. In occardance with Open Access movement Open DOAR & ROAR were set up.