The latest article on Open Access(OA) in the Conversation by Danny Kingsley summarises the differences between the NHMRC and ARC policies on O

Digging into Data is a useful online resource listing repositories.

It includes:

• Digital libraries
• Data archives
• Data repositories

For each repository, you'll find a description of their contents, contact information, and other details.

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.

Museum Metadata Exchange is an excellent discovery tool for researchers wishing to explore Australian museums and institutional collections. It offers descriptions and links to a wide range of collections throughout Australia.

A snapshot of the different collections you can discover in this valuable search tool:

National - The Australian National Maritime Museum including, Australian Indigenous burial rituals or 19th century immigrant journals and songs.

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 Se

Tropical Data Hub is a specialist data repository for tropical dataset.

The repository is organised within specific research fields including:

• State of the tropics.
• People and societies in the tropics.
• Industries and economies in the tropics.
• Tropical health, medicine and biosecurity.
• Tropical ecosystems, conservation and climate change.

For further information search the map and find the data.

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.

Thomson Reuters has announced the release of the Data Citation Index. The index will be hosted on the Web of Knowledge platform, and will become available in late 2012.

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.

In early June, the Repositories Support Project (RSP) held an interesting and well-received event on "Scholarly Communications: New Developments in Open Access." The event was attended by librarians, repositories specialists, research officers and copyright consultants. Presentations were held on open access, social media, data citation, and research networking.