The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project
(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff,
librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of
Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It
aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a
new publishing model, that of the overlay journal - defined, for the purposes of the project,
as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more
open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.
The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of
certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will
be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete
scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the
arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the
RIOJA toolkit.
To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers
has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report