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Open Access Journals and Australian Research Online

Australian Research Online (ARO) is a free, web-based service that provides simultaneous searching across the contents of Australian university and government research repositories, in addition to other collections of Australian research. It provides a means for researchers and the general public to discover academic research outputs, such as journal articles, conference papers and theses. ARO has grown rapidly in both the number of records and contributors since its inception in March 2005. In December 2009 ARO contained over 350 000 records.

The National Library of Australia hosts the service and staff are always on the lookout for new collections of research. A rich source was recently found in the form of online journals using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) digital publishing software.

OJS is a journal management and publishing system first released in 2002 as a research and development initiative of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) at the University of British Columbia. OJS is open source software made freely available to journals worldwide with the purpose of assisting open access publishing of scholarly content. Rather than the standard pay-per-view model for academic journal articles, open access provides immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material. According to PKP’s website, ’open access can increase a journal's readership as well as its contribution to the public good on a global scale’.

A range of institutions use the OJS software to host open access journal content, including Swinburne University, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Queensland. The Library also uses OJS software to host a range of journals, and staff papers.

Records from OJS journals with Australian content are harvested into Australian Research Online via the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OJS journal content can be rendered compliant with this protocol and thereby makes contributions to the service possible.

In December 2009 Australian Research Online contained content from over 25 OJS journals on subjects as diverse as adoption, archaeology, local governance, architecture and Australian literature. These records are also available in Trove, the Library’s new integrated discovery service, which includes content from ARO, Picture Australia, Libraries Australia and a wide range of other sources.

Please contact ARO if your research agency would like to contribute records.

For further information, follow the links to ARO, OJS and Trove.

Natasha Simons, Manager, ARO