French research institute launches OA repository

France's Institut français de recherche pour l'exploitation de la mer (Ifremer) has launched Archimer, an OA institutional repository. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.) From the English-language version of the repository front page:

[Archimer] provides a database of full-text documents covering post-publications (final drafts published in peer-reviewed journals), theses, conference proceedings and Ifremer reports.  These scientific publications can thus be read online, free of charge, by any potential user with access to the Internet.

Archimer aims at:

• providing a better visibility to Ifremer research output, in all fields related to oceans (aquaculture and fisheries for instance, but also geosciences, biology, ecology...)

• increasing impact: more scholars and scientists have free and rapid access to Ifremer research output, thus increasing its citation impact

• promoting research output of the institute by aggregating its publications in a structured and interoperable database (compliant with the OAI-PMH)

This project fits in the international development of Open Access, which aims at providing free access to scientific literature to the widest audience via the Internet.

Update. I've just heard from Frederic Merceur, director of Archimer. He informs me that Archimer was launched a year ago but is in the news now because it has recently released a report (in French) showing that more than 70% of Ifremer articles published in the past year are now OA through Archimer. (Kudos to Merceur and Archimer for that unusually high deposit rate.) OAN readers will also be interested in Avano, an OAI Harvester for the marine and aquatic sciences that Ifremer launched two weeks ago.