ABSTRACT
Technical harmonisation is an important goal of the DRIVER project, as it is essential for building a common infrastructure for research repositories. From the survey it appears that over the last years some progress has been made. Although the software market is still fragmented, two market leaders have increased their market share to, together, 50% (DSpace and GNU EPrints). The other half of the market share goes to more than 10 other software packages. The DRIVER guidelines have been developed by the DRIVER project to ensure high- level interoperability and retrieval of content. 82% of the respondents know about them and 54.5% makes every effort to follow them.
The percentage of research repositories with a persistent identifier assigned to each document has increased from 74.6% in the 2006 survey to 84.3% in the 2008 survey. The Handle system and URN are used most frequently (with over 35% each). The DOI and PURL identifiers are used by 12 to 15% of the repositories.
Over 50% of the participating research repositories have secured long- term availability of their materials. Over 30% have plans to do so.
Over 70% of the participating research repositories log the statistical data on access and usage.
Over 30% of the participating research repositories assign a unique identifier to each author. A similar percentage is developing it.
Over 60% of the research repositories comply with the qualified Dublin core standards. About 40% follow the unqualified Dublin core standards. With regard to the metadata standards, the figures are as follows: OAI-ORE 14.6%, MODS 12.4%, MARC21 11.2%, and DIDL 9%. Over 45% of the repositories are technically prepared for Enhanced Publications. More than 30% have plans for preparations.
The large majority of research repositories (86%) do have some form of subject or keyword indexing: over 50% in English language, over 30% in a non-English-language.
