Open Access (OA) content on one seamless and easy-to-use platform: that is the goal of the Open Research Library (ORL), which has officially launched today at www.openresearchlibrary.org.
A number of leading players in the library and OA community have joined forces to support the ORL for the benefit of researchers, scientists and academic institutions worldwide, including Knowledge Unlatched, Biblioboard, EBSCO Discovery ServiceTM, ProQuest with the Ex Libris Primo® and Summon® library discovery services, and OCLC with their creation of MARC records and indexing in WorldCat and WorldCat Discovery.
A powerful hosting platform that makes scientific book publications, and other high-quality academic OA content, freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, ORL provides free access to a comprehensive collection of thousands of scholarly monographs, anthologies, journals, videos, posters and other formats. It caters to the core principle of OA—unobstructed access to academic materials with full interoperability of content data and metadata.
“Our goal is to develop a truly digital offering. Instead of rebuilding what is already there, we want to maximize the virtues of OA,” says Nina Weisweiler, ORL’s product manager. “Working with powerful digital distribution services enables us to make scholarly content automatically available to researchers without any delays after publication.”
“ORL started out as a project to demonstrate that different types of companies and initiatives can successfully cooperate to create a very tangible benefit to the research community,” says Mitchell Davis, CEO at BiblioBoard. “We are thrilled to support this project with our proven technology.”
As it has done with other OA initiatives, particularly KU Select, Knowledge Unlatched will garner financial support for ORL through its crowdfunding mechanism, encouraging libraries worldwide to support the growing cost of a complex infrastructure. This will allow ORL to achieve its full potential. However, use of the platform remains independent from supporting it financially, and researchers and libraries may access all content on the platform freely and without restriction at any time.
In the coming weeks, ORL will offer webinars to libraries and publishers interested in learning more about the options for integration and sharing feedback. More details will soon be available on ORL’s website.
Libraries interested in further information may contact ORL representatives at info@openresearchlibrary.org.
