MedOANet (Mediterranean Open Access Network), a two-year project funded under the Science in Society Programme of the EC 7th Framework Programme, has announced the release of the Open Access Tracker, an online tool.
The project seeks to enhance existing policies, strategies and structures for open access (OA) and contributes towards the implementation of new ones in six Mediterranean countries - Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal.
In order to keep track of advancements, to observe the growth of OA in these countries and to have real time overview of the latest based on authoritative sources, the Open Access Tracker has been developed.
The tool brings together information on journals, repositories, institutional policies, funder's policies and publishers' self-archiving policies, representing OA activities in the six countries.
The Tracker draws information from authoritative services such as DOAJ, SHERPA/RoMEO, SHERPA/Juliet, OpenDOAR and ROARMAP. It shows the growth of different types of OA activities and policies in numbers, effectively creating a profile for each country. It also visually presents the growth of these different types of OA resources by country, by year as recorded in the external sources. The Tracker is intended to encourage the stakeholder community to register its OA resources with these established services from which it draws information, in order to increase the accuracy of information regarding the state of OA in the six countries.
The online tool has search and browse functions to allow easy discovery of the recorded information. It allows users to have a real-time overview on OA in each and all six countries, and highlights ongoing activities on OA with reference to journals, repositories and policies. The tool also enables users to know at a glance publishers' and funders' policies per country represented in the Tracker; compare the trends on OA in the Mediterranean area; and observe the yearly growth of the OA resources it tracks. Additionally, it offers a tool to promote OA with facts and figures supporting advocacy activities.
