SHERPA Services launched a significant upgrade to its SHERPA/RoMEO service early last week.
Provided by the University of Nottingham, SHERPA/RoMEO lists the self-archiving policies of many of the world's academic publishers and has become a valuable and well-used resource in the move towards Open Access.
The layout and navigation of the site remains generally the same, albeit with a bit of a makeover. The real changes are in the journal data. Central to the upgrade is an new journal database containing data on 18,000 journals (taking new data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Entrez journal list, in addition to the existing Zetoc journal data provided by the British Library).
The result is increased coverage and more accurate searching at the journal level. We've tried it out over the past week and can definitely see the improvements. It's now much clearer to see when a journal is published on behalf of a smaller academic society. And whereas before an ISSN search may have displayed policies for a number of publishers (i.e. Elsevier, Elsevier Cell Press) you now get a single publisher policy displayed per journal search.
We're impressed but see the Storify box below to see what others have been saying about the recent upgrade...
