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The launch of SHERPA Search

SHERPA is pleased to announce the release of a trial search service for UK repositories. The service currently offers two scopes: one for searching SHERPA Partner repositories and another for all UK open access repositories. This compliments the recent OpenDOAR Search of global repositoires and gives a national and SHERPA based view of research information.

This has been made possible through the recent launch by Google of its Custom Search Engine, which allows SHERPA to define a search service based on SHERPA Partners contents.

Users of these services can search through the SHERPA Partners repositories of freely available research information, with the assurance that each of these repositories has been assembled by these institutions for the purposes of disseminating academically relevant research information. This quality controlled approach will minimise (but not eliminate!) spurious or junk results, and lead more directly to useful and relevant information. Such searches will draw on content from SHERPA Partners or UK-based repositories. For research purposes, a global search might be more appropriate. OpenDOAR provides such a global search service.

This service does not use the OAI-PMH protocol, or the metadata held within repositories. Instead, it relies on Google's indexes, which in turn rely on repositories being suitably structured and configured for the Googlebot web crawler. If you are an administrator and your material is not being retrieved, see the SHERPA Search page for advice as to how to make you repository compliant with Google search.