Institutional repositories

A basic idea of Open Access publishing is that the results of research financed by the public also should be freely available to the public. One way of meeting this demand is to establish online repositories for collecting, preserving, and disseminating -- in digital form -- the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. The Norwegian government, The Research Council of Norway and EU have put ”open access” on their agenda and along with this, repositories have been set up at universities and research institutions all over Europe.

In Norway, the first repositories were established at the four largest universities respectively, with DUO (Oslo), BORA (Bergen), DIVA (Trondheim) and MUNIN . (Tromsoe).

Brage IMR has been established as an institutional repository for our institute, the Institute of Marine Research (IMR). Today the repository contains 2700 fulltext documents. The aim is to build a repository that will contain most of the research results from IMR As the repository is available free of charge from anywhere in the world, the research results of our institute will be promoted and the results from each scientist be more accessible and receive a greater impact.

On a national level, the search engine NORA will search for scientific publications in all Norwegian repositories. OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources worldwide.

Some of the most important partners for IMR have also established their institutional repositories : Archimer (IFREMER); WHOAS (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution / Marine Biological Laboratory) and Brage NP (Norwegian Polar Institute)

Internationally, Avano is harvesting 288 marine institutional archives worldwide . Our Brage IMR is registered, but there are still some technical problems to overcome. In Africa and South America, marine institutions are working together on an open digital archive: OceanDocs.

Are we allowed to post articles in institutional repositories after they are published in a journal? The publishers own the published articles, we know, but they provide certain limited rights to how we can use pdf `s afterwards. These rights vary from publisher to publisher and from journal to journal and must be checked out on the website of the individual publisher, see ROMEO

Read more and see list of resources in Wikipedia