ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories, has launched an Overview of Open Access to showcases open access material from repositories around the world. Picking one recent deposit at a time, the animated map cycles around the world's repositories showing a description of the deposit itself, together with a description and thumbnail of the repository's home page. Every few seconds another deposit is chosen from another repository, making what we hope is an interesting trip around the World of Open Access! The title of each repository and each deposit is linked from the display, allowing viewers to explore repositories and open access research from around the globe.

(This is an unfunded, temporary, experimental service provided by the ROAR/EPrints team at Southampton. We hope to develop it into a useful tool for advocacy: ultimately we would like to showcase your repository, your deposits and your institution in the context of the world's scientific research. Please bear with us if there are any early technical glitches! Any comments and suggestions should be directed to Tim Brody (tdb2@ecs.soton.ac.uk), whereas criticisms and complaints should be sent to Les Carr (lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk). ROAR (roar.eprints.org) is a service which tracks the growth of Open Access in almost 2000 repositories across the world. Together with our OpenDOAR partners (www.opendoar.org), we seek to catalogue, analyse and promote the adoption of Open Access services.)