Stargate opens up OAI access to all

Small publishers will be able to publish papers for open access following the University of Strathclyde’s Stargate (Static Repository Gateway and
Toolkit) project.

Funded by JISC, Stargate is exploring the use of simpler static repositories as a means of exposing publisher metadata to OAI-based disclosure, discovery and alerting services like Humbul within JISC’s Information Environment and on the internet.

Static repositories allow smaller publishers to participate in Open Archives Initiative (OAI) services without setting up a full repository.

John Robertson, Stargate project officer, said the OAI approach had the benefit of associating the publisher with the papers it publishes. “We want to promote the use of the OAI protocol primarily because it is easy to find papers online from an institutional repository but you don’t find a link to the publishers. The identity of the publisher is lost as the paper is associated with the author rather than the journal or issue.”

Although the project will initially focus on e-journals, static repositories lend themselves to other types of publishing, including e-books, elearning materials and other digital resources ( Click here for more OA news).

The project ends in May, by which time it hopes to have produced tools and guidelines for smaller publishers wishing to use static repositories.

OPEN ACCESS TERMS

Is terminology making open access a closed book? Here’s a useful guide:

OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is an application-independent interoperability framework based on
harvesting metadata.

Static repository An alternative to fully OAI-compliant repositories. Static repositories are aimed at metadata collections of between 1 and 5,000 records that are not able to host OAI PMH-compliant software.

Harvester A client application that requests and collects metadata from repositories.

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