The ARC has announced a new Open Access Policy, which takes effect from the 1st January 2013.

According to this new policy the ARC requires that any publications arising from an ARC supported research project must be deposited into an open access institutional repository within a twelve (12) month period from the date of publication.

It differs from the NHMRC Open Access Policy, in that it will not be applied retrospectively to existing funded research.

The policy commences on 1 January 2013, but the first publications are not potentially due to be made available in an institutional repository until after 1 January 2014.
The policy will be incorporated into all new Funding Rules and Agreements released after 1 January 2013. It will not be applied retrospectively to pre-existing Funding Rules and Agreements.

The aim of ARC's Policy is to ensure that the findings of publicly funded research are made available to the wider public as soon as possible. Both the research community and the public gain from knowledge derived from ARC funded research, and both wish to derive maximum benefit from these outputs.

Commentaries on the policy…..

The Conversation

9 Jan 2013 - Free for all: ARC-funded research now open to the public

15 Jan 2013 - What is open access and why should we care?

The BASE search engine is designed to find academic open access resources. BASE is operated by the Bielefeld University Library. BASE provides an excellent 'Advanced Search' facility with options to limit by country, document type and publication year. Searches can be refined by content provider, subject and sorted by relevance. Records can also be checked on Google Scholar or directly exported to your referencing software.

BASE, OAIster and OpenDOAR are other examples of directories harvesting repositories using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) protocol. The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) lists open access repositories around the world; it's interesting to search by country and by deposit activity.

Dryad is an international data repository in the basic and applied biosciences. The goal of the repository is to preserve all the underlying data reported in a paper at the time of publications. Recognising the emerging trend of data citation, this is an excellent example of a repository supporting the management of data and sharing. See the November 2011 blog on Dryad for further information.

The Getty Research Portal provides global access to digitised art history texts in the public domain. The catalogue is multilingual, and provides an open access platform from which to search and download digital copies of publications in the scholarly areas of art, architecture, material culture and other fields.

The Portal was developed by the Getty Research Institute in collaboration with a range of libraries, including contributions from the Metopolitan Museum of Art and the Heidelberg University Library.

The Portal widens access to rare resources, and is of benefit to those researchers without easy access to art history libraries and museums. Access the Getty Research Portal at: http://portal.getty.edu/portal/landing.

The British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) is a United Kingdom national facility designed to hold, manage and distribute data concerning the marine environment. Data holdings include biological, chemical, physical and geophysical data, containing measurements of nearly 22,000 different variables.

BODC describes their approach to marine data management as:

• Careful storage, quality control and archiving of data - so that data are unaffected by changes in technology and will be available into the future.
• Distributing data to scientists, education, industry and the public - with a goal to enable online access to all data via the web site.
• Working alongside scientists during marine research projects - to provide a data management service during the life time of the project.

BODC holds a wealth of publicly accessible marine data under the provision of licence agreements. Read more about:

• Submitting, requesting and retrieving data.
• Data management services
• UK, European and International projects at BODC.
• The Published Data Library (PDL), which is an operational prototype that provides snapshots of specially chosen data sets, archived using rigorous version management. This enables citation of the data set in journal papers through the assignment of a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in collaboration with the British Library.

BODC is run by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and hosted by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection is a digital goldmine for Poe enthusiasts, students and researchers looking for primary sources, and writers and artists who want to dig deeper into Poe's life and work and see original, hand-written poems. The collection contains manuscripts, letters, documents, sheet music for songs based on Poe's poetry, books belonging to Poe, and photographs and portraits.

The collection not only includes finding aids, but also sports a Public Domain logo explaining that all items in the collection are free of copyright restrictions, and can be used freely!

The collection is a result of a joint venture beween the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas and the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.