Aquatic Commons is a thematic digital repository covering the natural marine, estuarine, brackish and freshwater environments.
The repository was started in 2007 and currently offers more than 5200 full-text documents on an Open Access basis.
At present (March 2012), Aquatic Commons ranks 409 in the World Ranking of more than 1200 repositories [1], its strong points being the number of rich text files and the number of papers and citations in its domain, whereas its drawback seems to be, up to now, the visibility of its materials [2].
As a co-funder, the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) Trust Fund basically provides support to those institutions in developing countries, for which the digitizing of the material could be beyond their possibilities.
It generally does so within a project framework, which also includes the "repatriation" of the digitized materials, and the retention of their copyright by the respective original institutions in developing countries.