FLORe – Florence Repository. The University of Florence Open Archive

Abstract

The University of Florence has a long and consolidated experience in the exploitation of open archives and self archiving by researchers. After a short introduction on current open access context in Europe and in Italy, the article recalls past experiences by tracing the history of the first e-prints archive and then describes the genesis of FLORe, the new research institutional repository developed to promote open access archiving by teachers and researchers at the University of Florence. Afterwards the architecture and the main functional and technical features of FLORe are discussed aiming to depict and to motivate the approach followed in implementing FLORe as an extension of U-GOV Research, the catalogue of scientific products, rather than an autonomous repository. Following and implementing the requirements stated by the University of Florence Open Access Commission, FLORe proves to be the right solution because it reduces operational costs, does not add a new graphical user interface, preserves the already well consolidated end-users self-archiving workflow and, at the same time, provides a simple and intuitive search interface with OAI-PMH support for research metadata dissemination.