In 2002, the U.K. Research Council created a new organization, SHERPA. "Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access." Among other projects, SHERPA began to record journal publisher policies. They created a searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories. The collection of “Rights MEtadata for Open archiving” became known as RoMEO.
"Self-archiving" is a term for the process by which authors deposit their works in open access repositories.