The National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction has had an OA mandate since 2003! Thanks to CISTI's Alison Ball, who also reports that NRC is moving towards OAI-PMH compliance for their pilot repository.
From CISTI News, Volume 23 #1, Summer 2007
Pilot project to provide open access to NRC publications
One research organization, one gateway for information. This is the goal of a new pilot project to demonstrate the viability of an NRC Publications Archive. This archive would establish an NRC-wide approach to managing and providing seamless access to NRC's scientific contributions, which translate to about 3,700 papers each year from 20 NRC institutes and 5 technology centres.
Called NPArC (pronounced N-Park) for short, the two-year, CISTI-funded pilot will offer public access to NRC publications from seven NRC institutes. Open-access search engines like Google Scholar will also be able to access the publications.
The institutes participating in the project include the Institute for Research in Construction (IRC), the Institute for National Measurement Standards (INMS), the Institute for Information Technology (IIT) and the Institute for Aerospace Research (IAR), which have publications databases; and the Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology (ICPET), the Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute (IMTI) and the Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) of the Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences (SIMS), which do not.
CISTI expects that this pilot will establish the importance of an institutional information repository in measuring NRC's performance at translating science and technology into value for Canada. In addition, the project will be a first step in making NRC's publications more accessible to the scientific community, as well as the general public.
This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement Series.
