University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden have developed a new service to help open access to research information.

OpenDOAR – the Directory of Open Access Repositories – is pleased to announce the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from www.opendoar.org.

This classifies archives holding research papers, conference papers, theses and other academic materials that are available as ‘open access’. THis means that anyone with an internet connection has access to this information without paying any charges. Open access to information has grown rapidly as researchers and scholars increasingly put their work on the web for free in these repositories. Some of these archives hold material on a single subject; others are based in universities and hold information from across many different subjects.