Interoperability of open access repositories in computer science and IT – an evaluation

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the interoperability of ten open access repositories in the field of computer science and IT.

The repositories are identified from the OpenDOAR directory of OA repositories. Five documents from each repository are searched in ten search engines/data discovery tools (OAIster, Scirus, Google, MSN, Yahoo, All the Web, Ask, Altavista, AOL and Gigablast) for determining the visibility of repositories. The documents from each repository are selected randomly using the function sample ( ) of R software.

None of the repositories in the study are fully interoperable (the visibility of repositories in search engines/data discovery tools range from 4 per cent to 92 per cent). OAI‐PMH compliance enhances the visibility of the repositories considerably. Google and MSN retrieved the highest number of documents from the repositories and Gigablast the least.

The paper will encourage the repository administrators to improve the visibility of their repositories keeping in view the indexing policies of various search engines to ensure maximum research impact.