Last week was Open Access Awareness week. The main purpose behind the week is to shed light on what exactly Open Access is and why you should care about it.  Basically the typical Library user/researcher is shielded from the astronomical cost of getting access to electronic content.  Typically the sponsoring institution pays the fee and the user never has to worry about payment.  The only problem is that the costs of these resources are getting out of hand.

Enter Open Access

Open Access is to publishing what Open Source is to Software.  It is a move from well meaning researchers to provide free access to research that gets produced on the public dime.  So instead of a public institution getting funding from the government, (or other granting bodies) producing some findings, and then having them published in a for-a-fee journal the research is provided to the end user without the intermediate sticky fingers of the publisher.  The process sounds noble and every year more and more titles appear on the Open Access list.  (The Directory of Open Access Journals is a perfect example of Open Access in action.)  Apart from Open Access journals there are also Open Access Repositories.  Which typically organize unrestricted content at an institution.  Like for instance the Brock University Digital Repository.

Aggregating Repositories

Having said that the next step is to make use of the information that is in these repositories.  That is were a search platform would come in handy.  Most repositories are getting involved with the cleverly named OAIster.  Which is a meta search platform that crawls these repositories and organizes the results into a unified interface.  The OAI standard that OAIster and all of these repositories operate on is nice and open.  XML based, interoperable, and if one is so inclined very easy to crawl with an open source package provided by Simon Fraser University.  So that is exactly what Waterford Institute of Technology did.

ResearchScope.net 

What WIT did was create an aggregate search interface that organizes all of Ireland's Open Access Research into one interface.

 The end result is a very usable site that any tax paying citizen of Ireland would be happy with.  The following video describes the site very nicely:

I feel like making an ultra local repository meta-search platform too.