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What is the scale of open access eprint archives, and of author self-archiving, currently? Despite the rhetoric there are no quantitative studies. The context for such studies is not just the growing scale of open access archives and the sheer number of archives, but the evolving structure of distributed archives and independent services. Web-based open access archives are not simply collections built for browsing but also as open data sources for powerful, automated independent services such as search, aggregation and impact measurement.
The enabling infrastructure for distributed archives and independent data services was introduced by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) with its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) in January 2001 (Lynch 2001). Tomaiuolo and Packer (2000) provided a checklist of disciplinary 'preprint' archives that, because OAI was then in its infancy, recognised the likely influence of cross-archive services such as search but could not have detected the growth in institutional archives that OAI has subsequently motivated.
So a new checklist is warranted, but a list of open access eprint archives, and examination of their contents, is insufficient as a measure of the challenge. It is important to look through the lens at archive service providers too.
Thus, this is not a list of individual open access archives of full-text research papers, but instead lists and comments on other lists of individual archives. This list and its categorisation gives a broad overview of the structure, size and progress of full-text open access eprint archives.
This list will be maintained and updated as far as is possible, and is intended to assist further quantitative research on the open access eprint phenomenon for those who want to measure the growth and quality of open access eprint archives.
For a chronological view of the development of open access institutional archives in the wider context of free online scholarship (FOS), including many of the services and archives listed here, see Suber's Timeline of the FOS Movement.
Lawrence, Steve (2001) "Free Online Availability Substantially Increases
a Paper's Impact". Nature Web Debate on e-access, May
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html
Lynch, Clifford A (2001) "Metadata Harvesting and the Open Archives
Initiative". ARL Bimonthly Report, No. 217, August
http://www.arl.org/newsltr/217/mhp.html
Suber, Peter (2002) Timeline of the Free Online Scholarship Movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Tomaiuolo, Nicholas G. and Packer, Joan G. (2000) "Preprint Servers:
Pushing the Envelope of Electronic Scholarly Publishing". Searcher,
Vol. 8, No. 9, October
http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct00/tomaiuolo&packer.htm
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