The main purpose of the Journal Information Resource is to provide agent-to-agent information about the parallel publishing conditions of various publishers of scientific journals. The information in the RoMEO database and website is its major source of information. JIR adds the facility of automatic generation of a recommendation for specific cases that are transmitted to it. In other words, the software system for an institutional archive can automatically send information requests for specific articles to the JIR server and obtain an answer back, in a strict and computer-understandable format, with a recommendation about whether and how the article in question can be put on-line for the purpose of parallel publication.
The basic aspects of such decisions is whether the publisher of a given journal permits parallel publishing at all, what kinds of servers are allowed for this purpose, whether there is an embargo period, and whether a payment is required. JIR is able to take these aspects into account, but in addition it is able to use information about what version of an article may be used for parallel publishing, including both the version of the contents (for example, pre-review or post-review versions), the graphical appearance of the article, and particular information that must be included in the posted version of the article.
Like any other system of this kind, JIR is not able to provide full and complete coverage of the information that it contains and uses. As editors of the JIR website we can therefore not take any responsibility for the correctness of the advise being provided in specific instances. Through the present website we attempt to describe the origin of the information we are using and our methods for managing it and updating it. By using this background information, the user of the JIR advise server must make her or his own judgement about the appropriateness of the advise that are being generated.