RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) was a 18-month partnership
between UCL (University College London), Imperial College London, and the Universities Glasgow, Cambridge and Cornell. The project was funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK). The project team worked with the Astrophysics community investigate aspects of overlay journals. For the purposes of the project, an overlay was defined as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides more open access repositories.
The project had both technical aims and supporting, non-technical aims. The primary
technical deliverable from the project was a toolkit for the creation and maintenance overlay journals. The toolkit supports the exchange of data between a repository and piece of journal software. It supports functions such as author validation, metadata
extraction from the source repository, and submission tracking. The toolkit is platform-neutral and could, in theory, be employed by any journal using content from any number repositories, in any discipline. The project also implemented a demonstrator overlay applying the RIOJA toolkit to the arXiv subject repository, and a demonstrator
implementation of the RIOJA tool for GNU EPrints.
Aside from creating the demonstrator and its underlying tools, the project aimed to acceptibility and feasibility of the overlay model. First, a large-scale survey of the
Astrophysics community was undertaken. The survey collected data about research publishing practices within this community, and probed its reaction to the principle publishing. Second, the views of editors and publishers in this discipline were sought
through interviews. These views were added to findings from the literature and summarised
in a more general report on issues around the sustainability of an overlay journal