 Deposition of BioMed Central articles in digital repositories The last few years has seen rapid growth in the number of digital repositories,
which fall into three main categories:
A challenge
faced by all digital repositories is that many traditional journals
only allow deposition of the author's manuscript version of the article, not
the final, 'official' version. Additionally, traditional publishers often specify
an embargo period of 6 or even 12 months before the research article can be
made openly available. Such restrictions clearly hamper the free flow of information.
In contrast, BioMed Central allows the final version of all published
research articles to be placed in any digital archive immediately on
publication. Authors are free to archive articles themselves,
but in many cases this is not necessary, as BioMed Central can automatically
supply a feed of open access articles to any repository that
wishes to receive it. BioMed Central also supports the OAI
metadata harvesting protocol which makes it easy for other repositories
to harvest our articles.
Institutional repositories
Institutions are increasingly setting up their own digital
repositories* in order to preserve
and make accessible their intellectual output. Several institutions now
have policies that request (or require) their members to
deposit a copy of any article that they publish into the
institution's digital repository. Publishing in a BioMed Central journal
makes it easy to satisfy the requirements of such a policy.
* For institutions looking for a simple
way to set up their own digital repository, BioMed Central has recently launched Open
Repository, a hosted institutional repository service. With Open Repository,
BioMed Central takes care of building, hosting and maintaining the institutional
repository, allowing the institution to focus on the most important task of
managing the content within the repository..
Further information on institutional repositories:
Funder-specific repositories
Many biomedical funders have issued statements explicitly supporting
open access to published scientific research. Two of the largest funders,
the National Institutes of Health in the US, and the Wellcome Trust in the
UK, have gone further and now request (or in Wellcome's case require) that
all recipients of their funding deposit copies of any resulting research articles
into the funder's own archive.
Publishing in an open access journal, such as one of those published
by BioMed Central, is an excellent way to comply with such a deposition policy.
BioMed Central automatically deposits published articles in these funders'
repositories which saves effort on the part of the author, who avoids
the need to go through a separate deposition process for their article.
Discipline-specific repositories
Many repositories also exist that serve the needs of researchers in a particular
discipline, bringing together research from multiple
institutions and funders. Some such archives are very broad in scope - for
example NIH's PubMed Central covers
all of biology and medicine, and ArXiV covers
all of physics. But many other repositories exist that cover more specialist
areas, ranging from CogPrints (cognitive
science and psychology), to Antbase (ant
taxonomy). Once again, a major benefit of BioMed Central's open access policy
is that it allows the final version of published articles to be included in
any such discipline-specific archive.
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