Open Information Science 2017; 1: 56–70 Samir Hachani* Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia’s presence in The Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) and The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR): A comparative study of their ratio of open access material https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2017-0005 Received December 6, 2016; accepted June 2, 2017 Abstract: Open access has seen a great many developments since its inception some twenty five years ago. From an individual initiative it evolved into an institutional then a governmental action that gave it more weight. These initiatives that took place in the last decade of the twentieth century, and are still going on, have coincided with a revolution that has impacted our daily lives and more precisely our lives as researchers: the Internet which changed our ways of doing scientific research and whose influence could be seen live under our own eyes. While open access in the developed world has thrived, in the developing world to which Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia belong it seems to lag behind. As an example of this, the three countries have together only fifteen and thirteen open repositories in The Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) and The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) respectively. Beside this quantitative weakness, these open repositories do not seem to implement a clear open access policy as most of them do restrict access to registered users with an account and a password which contravenes the most primary open access philosophy allowing access to scientific literature pending only an Internet connection. Additionally, previous studies have shown that the most basic open access concepts seem to be misconstrued by those in charge for a national open access policy. In consequence, this has impacted negatively on the performance of these open repositories and the ratio of its open access literature. It is suggested that bigger importance and means be given to the question by the people in charge. Cooperative projects such as ISTeMAG should be encouraged and should be the basis of a sound open access policy and allow these countries to attain the much coveted title of The Information Society. Keywords: Open access, open repositories, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia 1 Introduction Open access has accomplished since its inception a great many developments that have made it one of the most talked subjects in the scientific literature. Having started in the developed world, it has achieved great strides and developments in a medium promising freer and more access to information. On the other hand, the developing countries lag far behind and have not, so far, taken advantage of this new manner of undertaking science. In light of all this, our study will try to answer the following question: What developments have Research Article *Corresponding author: Samir Hachani , Algiers'University 2, Bouzareah, Algiers, Algeria, E-mail:sam_hac1@yahoo.fr Open Access. © 2017 Samir Hachani, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Unauthenticated Download Date | 7/28/18 6:35 AM