BioMed Central, the London based Open Access (OA) publisher has launched Open Repository, a service which provides organisations with an opportunity to adopt and outsource the exercise of building a repository.

Institutional repositories - electronic stores of the institution's published content - have been gaining attention of late. The Publisher and Library/Learning Solutions (PALS) group said repositories will have a major impact on scholarly publishing, while the House of Commons select committee report, Scientific Publications: Free for all?, published on 20 July 2004 advocated the adoption of institutional repositories by universies.

"Institutional repositories have great potential for opening up scientific literature," said Jan Velterop, Publisher and Director of BioMed Central. "Their potential, however, will only be fully realised if those repositories are set up well and in such a way that their content is truly free."

Natasha Robshaw, head of marketing for BioMed Central, said universities in the UK, Canada and France had expressed an interest in the new service. "This will be an extremely cost-effective solution that will enable institutions to quickly set up a repository and take the pain out of maintaining it," Robshaw told IWR.

Open Repository provides organisations with a service that will build, launch, maintain and populate an institutional repository. BioMed Central believes organisations are being held back by a lack of infrastructure and technical capacity to build a repository in-house. Robshaw expects organisations to be interested in the hosting service.

"Hosting is a pain to set up and the on-going costs can be high. We have the servers and the Oracle databases to run repositories on our systems." BioMed Central will charge a one-off set-up fee to build the repository using DSpace, an open source software application.

Customers can add a wide variety of content formats to the repository, including Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files, videos or databases. BioMed Central offers a service that converts articles to PDF and XML formats. All repositories will feature a search engine.

"If institutions chose to convert their content to PDF and XML it preserves the material and increases access as popular search engines like Google can crawl XML files," Robshaw said.