About the service
The International Repositories Directory (IRD) is managed by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).
Criteria for Inclusion
Each repository in this directory satisfies the following criteria:
- The majority of its content is fully Open Access
- It supports OAI-PMH
Management of the Data
The metadata in this directory is harvested from the repositories themselves, and is updated on a regular basis. Some of the metadata is updated automatically, but the metadata records are also curated by organisations called “Responsible Organisations” which allocate people and resources to maintain the accuracy and timeliness of the metadata.
The directory contains metadata records about repositories. At any time, each record is in one of the four “states”:
- Draft: A repository has been identified, but not yet assessed or verified by the IRD service.
- Awaiting Review: The identified repository has been judged to be “in scope”, has passed some initial automated checking but has not yet been allocated to a Responsible Organisation.
- Under Review: The identified repository is being reviewed by the allocated Responsible Organisation.
- Published: The repository has been reviewed by the allocated Responsible Organisation and is verified as accurate and up-to-date.
- Archived: The repository is no longer active, or is out-of-scope. The record is archived and no longer published on the IRD service.
License
The data in the IRD may be re-used without restriction. More formally, it is licensed under the CC0 License.
Software Development and Maintenance
The software for the IRD is developed, deployed and maintained by Antleaf. The open-source code for this software is licensed under the MIT License.
Acknowledgements
IRD Working Group
COAR would like to thank the IRD Working Group for their valuable contribution to the development of the IRD:
- Iryna Kuchma, EIFL
- Pierre Lasou, Université de Laval
- Lautaro Matas, LA Referencia
- Pedro Príncipe, University of Minho
- Kazu Yamaji, National Institute of Informatics
- Kathleen Shearer, COAR
- Paul Walk, Antleaf
- Virginia Barbour, Open Access Australasia (past member)
Research Organization Registry (ROR)
The IRD uses data downloaded, by permission, from the Research Organization Registry (ROR). IRD uses ROR to disambiguate the names of organisations in the directory, where possible.
Other sources of information
Some third-party registries/directories/lists have been used to identify candidates for inclusion in IRD. These include (among others):
- ROAR
- OpenDOAR
- Re3data
- Crowdsourced information about Dataverse installations
- Hyku Commons
- NII (Japan) Repositories List
Thanks also to the following individuals who have supplied information about repositories:
Responsible Organisations
Responsibility for the curation of records in this directory is distributed to Responsible Organisations:
