Repository (publishing)

A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing, is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles.

Deposit of material in such a site may be mandatory for a certain group, such as a particular university's doctoral graduates in a thesis repository, or published papers from those holding grants from a particular government agency in a subject repository, or, sometimes, in their own institutional repository. Or it may be voluntary, as usually the case for technical reports at a university.

Organization

They can be organized in several different manners:

• A repository established by a particular university or other research institution is known as an institutional repository. It can be intended to collect and preserve—in digital form—the intellectual output of an institution, as PhD theses, EngD theses, preprints, postprints, working papers, or technical reports. It can also contain the institutions digital library, the collection of printed and manuscript documents, public archives, & graphic material, originating from the institution or elsewhere, that the university has converted to digital form for use within the university, and generally available to anyone. It can also contain the administrative output of the institution, as reports, directories, and local archival documentation. A well-developed example is the eScholarship Repository of the University of California Digital Library.

• A repository established for the use of a particular academic department or laboratory is properly called a departmental repository, though the term institutional repository is also used. An example is ePrints for the School of Electronics and Computer Science, The University of Southampton, UK.

• A repository established to collect and preserve material in a particular discipline or subject is called a disciplinary repository or subject repository; they can be organized by a government, a government department, or by a research or academic institution, or be autonomous. Some of the best known are arXiv for mathematics and physics articles or reports, PubMed Central for biomedical journal articles, and CiteSeerX for computer and information science articles and reports.

• A repository for general use by scholars working in a particular country is a national repository, but such repositories can also be organized on a more local basis. In the UK, the British Library operates a national repository open to those who have no institutional repository

• A repository can also be intended for a particular type of material, such as a thesis repository or a newspaper repository.

See also

• e-Book
• Electronic journal
• Open access (publishing)
• Open Archives Initiative
• Referatory

Examples of repositories

• Australian Research Repositories Online to the World
• South African Institutional Repositories
• North Carolina Learning Object Repository

References and further reading

• Carol Tenopir and Donald W. King, Towards Electronic Journals, Special Libraries Association, 2000.
• John Willensky, The Access Principle. MIT Press, 2006.

External links

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
• Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
• Making Institutional Repositories a Collaborative Learning Environment
• Open Access News by Peter Suber
• About the PURE application by Atira A/S
• Beyond Open Access: Open Discourse, the next great equalizer, Retrovirology 2006, 3:55
• Israel Scholar Works Archive
• Openarchives.eu - The European Guide to OAI-PMH Institutional Repositories in the World
• ePrints
• School of Electronics and Computer Science, The University of Southampton, UK