Oxfam GB, an organisation known for its anti-poverty programme and campaigning work, has adopted BioMed Central’s Open Repository service. The service allows organisations to build, launch, host and maintain their own repositories.
Oxfam produces research and policy materials from its experience across the world. Through the implementation of the Open Repository system, Oxfam expects to maximise the distribution of this documentation in a one-stop personalised repository, at a fraction of the cost of other commercial systems.
Working with affiliate organisations in the Oxfam International Confederation, Oxfam GB concentrates on three interlinked areas of work - emergency response to provide swift aid to people in need, focusing on water and sanitation, and public health; long-term development projects which help people in poor communities identify what keeps them in poverty, and then control and work towards solutions to their own problems; and high profile campaigning for long term and sustainable change.
Capturing and structuring, and then showcasing, Oxfam’s extremely large and evolving output of research and policy information from these programmes was reportedly a significant challenge for the organisation. Through this partnership, Oxfam is now said to have a flexible, reliable repository solution which allows it to organise and share this material on a global basis.
An increasing number of organisations are looking to provide open and unrestricted access to their published research and reference materials, to share learning, and to demonstrate transparency and accountability. This has led organisations like Oxfam to look for innovative ways to store and classify, and then publish and publicise, their resources, it has been observed.
BioMed Central's Open Repository is projected to provide an extremely cost effective solution for institutions looking to showcase their open access research. The service is built upon the latest version of DSpace, an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works. Customers of Open Repository can expect to benefit from updated system features not only from DSpace itself, but also from BioMed Central's team.
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