Teaching Resources and Support: Open access repositories

Subject repositories are digital collections of the research outputs within particular subject areas or disciplines, developed specifically to meet the needs of these communities.

• Research publications included in subject repositories may or may not be peer-reviewed
• The research publications in most subject repositories are distributed globally and searchable on the Web

Examples of Subject Repositories:

• Open Access Directory (OAD) - Subject Repositories 
  List of Open Access subject repositories
• arXiv.org 

  Open access to over one million academic articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

• Open Science Directory 

  Directory which provides access to over 13000 scientific journals, indexed from DOAJ, eJDS, BioMed Central, HighWire Press and others.

• Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) 

  Library of over 700,000 research papers across 30 disciplines.

• bioRxiv 

  bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.

• RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) 

  Index to publishing in economics and related sciences created by hundreds of volunteers worldwide.

• CogPrints 

  Online repository for self-archived papers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science, philosophy and biology.

• PubMed Central This link opens in a new window

  PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)

• DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) This link opens in a new window

  Collection of over 10,000 academic peer-reviewed ebooks. These books can also be found in the Library Catalogue.

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) 

  Free full text quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

• OAIster 

  Catalogue of millions of records representing open access digital resources which are held in open access collections worldwide.

• CORE (COnnecting REpositories) (Open University)

  CORE provides searchable access to millions of research papers from repositories and Open Access journals. Useful for locating theses and dissertations.
  Best viewed in Firefox or Chrome browsers

• JURN

  A unique search-engine dedicated to indexing free and open access journals and theses in the arts and humanities, science, biomedical, business and ecology related topics.

Institutional repositories are digital collections of the research outputs created within a research institution.

Although most institutional repositories aim to make research outputs openly available, they usually contain a combination of:

• Open Access (OA) full text
• Embargoed full text
• Metadata only records

Research publications included in institutional repositories may or may not be peer-reviewed

• Repositories may include pre-prints, post-prints and published versions
• The research publications in most institutional repositories are distributed globally and searchable on the Web

Find Institutional Repositories Globally

• CORE

Based in the UK, CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public. In this way CORE facilitates free unrestricted access to research for all.

• Digital Commons Network

Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.

• OpenDOAR: the Directory of Open Access Repositories

An authoritative directory of 2,000 academic open access repositories with freely available academic research information. Each repository has been visited by project staff to give a quality-controlled list of repositories.

• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

Lists and shows the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Like OpenDOAR, ROAR has an option to search for a particular repository, or for open access content.