The Other Side of the Open Access Coin

I write quite frequently about open access - the idea that people should have free online access to research that they have paid for, and ideally even where they haven't. But alongside the issue of getting stuff out in the open, there is the problem of where you put it so that everyone can find it and access it. The answer is in what are rather off-puttingly called "institutional repositories", and it turns out that open source has been there from the start:

What was needed was a custom-built software platform to allow universities to create a dedicated repository in which faculty could archive them. And as the emphasis shifted from central subject-based repositories to smaller cross-disciplinary repositories, it was realised that a low-cost solution would be needed. In 2000, therefore, the UK's University of Southampton released EPrints. The first dedicated repository software, EPrints was made available as freely downloadable Open Source software.

If you want to find out more about the, er, exciting story of repositiories, don't miss the latest of Richard Poynder's elegant interviews - although I do wish he'd get rid of the donation bit.