SHERPA – Open Access Institutional Repositories
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/

The original SHERPA partnership was formed for the SHERPA project (2002-2006) and drew from research-led universities with an active interest in establishing an example of a then-new concept – an open access institutional repository. After a year, the original 7 development partners were joined by 6 more partners to form a partnership of 21 individual institutions. They now have 26 institutions overall, consisting of 24 HE institutions, the British Library and the AHDS. SHERPA achieved its original goals ahead of schedule and within budget and has been an active presence on the developing field of institutional repository use. The partnership has now gone on to collaborate in a number of other open access projects. The partnership is a large and varied consortium and has within its membership a range of examples of repository environments and institutional structures. The partners are all research-led institutions, all with practical experience of building and populating eprint repositories. As such they are well placed to take full advantage of the facilities that eprint repositories and extended-data repositories can offer. This strong and varied consortial background offers the ideal environment for exploring and testing ideas for repository development, which can be evaluated and disseminated to the wider community. SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA Services include: a) RoMEO – Publisher’s copyright & archiving policies, b) JULIET – Research funders archiving mandates and guidelines, c) OpenDOAR worldwide Directory of Open Access Repositories, and d) SHERPA Search – simple full-text search of UK repositories. This has been added to Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.