Open Archives
More about Open Archives
The Open Archives are archives made up of over 1,000,000 documents, which are made accessible to the scientific community for free via internet. These include pre-print and post-print documents, theses, etc. and cover a range of disciplines including chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc.
The user can search for and collect documents thanks to the versatile OAIPMH protocol (Open Archives Protocol for Meta data Harvesting).
Open Archives and digitAlexandria
The digitAlexandria system includes the OAIPMH protocol, and has thus collected the majority of these documents, making them easily and transparently available to users of the dA software. Thanks to the Freescience freeware software, a substantial amount of the most relevant OAI archives is available for free. Furthermore dA users' submitted documents are visible within the entire scientific community, since the dA archive may be harvested by OAI service providers.
The following is a table outlining the features of the dA system, highlighting the functions available through the OAIPMH protocol.
| Features | Description |
|---|---|
| Number of documents available in the OAI system | about 1.500.000 |
| Number of OAI documents available from dA | about 1.000.000 |
| Subjects | chemistry, physics, astronomy, electronics, information technology, mathematics |
| Access to full text OAI documents | depends on the policy of the archive in which they are stored. |
| Access to document descriptions | always available, even if the sever cannot be accessed from the network. |
| Access to documents through the dA network using the OAIPMH protocol | the documents shared by dA users are always available through the OAIPMH
protocol even if the user is not connected (this function can be
disactivated at any time). However downloading full text documents is only possible through the dA client software and not through the OAIPMH protocol. |
List of OAI Archives harvested by the dA system
during executing of querydigitAlexandria registered as Service Provider
Self archiving e copyright
The right of an author to republish a copy of their own work online (self-archiving) is assured by the Italian constitution. This right is overruled only in the contracts of certain publishers, a list of these publishers will be posted here