SHERPA/RoMEO

The SHERPA/RoMEO (<http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php>) service has become an essential, standard tool for researchers to easily navigate academic publishers’ copyright and self-archiving policies when depositing scholarly articles in an institutional repository (IR). This Open Access database is one of a suite of services provided by the SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) organization in their mission to facilitate Open Access institutional repositories and expedite “…the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.” (SHERPA n.d.) The SHERPA services are located in the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham and funded by Jisc (Joint Information Systems Committee). While at first the interface may seem outdated compared to commercial enterprises, the RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving) database has been expanding access by adding languages options to its interface, steadily growing its dataset, and updating a prototype API.