Open repositories are electronic services designed to preserve and provide open access to journal article reprints or preprints, audio, video and other media, and/or digital data. Unlike electronic journal or book publishers, they do not generally themselves provide editing or peer review services, though they may provide access to edited, peer-reviewed documents. Repositories may be maintained by an institution for the benefit of its own authors and researchers, or be open to deposits from any researcher in a given subject area. Some funding agencies require that articles and/or data from the research that they fund be deposited in an open access repository (see: Funding Agency Mandates.). For more detailed information on repositories, consult the Repositories page of the UCSB Library Research Data Management Subject Guide.
University of California Repositories
Dryad is a new self-service research data publishing service for campus. Dryad provides UCSB researchers with user-friendly tools to upload and describe their data for access and reuse and to create citations and persistent identifiers for each dataset. Dryad also allows researchers to set a future publication date for data still under peer review.
Dryad is an open data repository with search and browse capabilities for finding and downloading data. Users can search for data submitted just by UCSB researchers as well as data submitted through one of the other participating institutions, including other UC campuses.
Dryad is FREE for affiliates of UC Santa Barbara with a UCSB NetID. A personal ORCID identifier is required to deposit data in Dryad. Visit the ORCID site to obtain one. The first time you log in to Dryad with your ORCID, you will be asked to link your ORCID to your UCSB NetID, and thereafter your deposits will be affiliated with UCSB.
- Dryad Data Repository
- Frequently Asked Questions – note that Dryad is free for affiliates of UC Santa Barbara so pricing information does not apply
- Terms of Service
- Preparing Your Data
For assistance with depositing data or for any questions related to Dryad, contact the UCSB Library Research Data Services.
eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship. Among its services is providing a repository for postprints of articles by University of California authors. (http://escholarship.org/publish_postprints.html).
Merritt is a University of California Curation Center (UC3) repository for digital assets of all kinds, including texts, images, videos, audio recordings and datasets.
Source Lists for Repositories
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
OpenDOAR is a directory of open access repositories maintained at the University of Nottingham (UK). It lists over 2,100 repositories worldwide. OpenDOAR allows you to search or browse for repositories by name, subject, content type, repository type, country, language, or software. OpenDOAR also has a tool to allow you to search repository content and provides interesting statistical graphs on subject, country, etc. as well as repository polcies.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
ROAR is a directory of open access repositories worldwide, maintained at the University of Southampton (UK). It lists almost 2,500 repositories taken from OpenDOAR and other sites. You may search its list by name, country, subject, software type, date of creation and other criteria. Records for individual repositories display a thumbnail of the home page, activity graphs, country of origin, supporting organization, formats and number of objects contained, as well as a link to the repository itself.
Repository66.org Repository Maps
Repository66.org takes data from ROAR and OpenDOAR and graphs the repositories, using icons to indicate the repository’s size and software platform. Clicking on the icon provides a link to the repository, information about the repository, and a search box to search it via Google, Google Scholar or Microsoft Live. You may view the worldwide map, or zoom in on specific countries, and filter by software platform or date of founding.
Discipline Specific Repositories
Besides institution-specific responsitories, the other main category of repositories is discipline-specific repositories, designed to serve a particular subject area. Here are a select few.
In addition to the subject search capabilities of the general source lists above, you may also find subject-specific repositories at the Discipline Repositories page (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Disciplinary_repositories) of the Simmons College Open Access Directory wiki.
Some of the most important subject-specific repositories are:
arXiv, originally created at Los Alamos National Laboratory and now housed at Cornell University, serves the physics community, especially high-energy particle physics. It is actually a preprint server, acting as the original publisher for many physics papers which may later appear in peer-reviewed journals.
bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank)
The World Bank will be adopting an Open Access policy which went into effect July 1, 2012. The OKR was created as a home for the Bank's research outputs. Upon launch, three years worth of publications were made available, but they are working on adding content retrospectively. See the World Bank's Data Services for access to their open data.
Open Science Framework Preprint Repository
The Open Science Framework hosts repositories across the disciplines. They are leading the way in a new preprint revolution to facilitate open access to and community review of new research prior to publication.
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). PMC derives its importance as the mandated repository for articles based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health. Some journals automatically deposit all their content in PMC, others do so selectively at the request of NIH-funded authors.
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
RePEc is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 76 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components.
Social Science Research Network
The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 281,400 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers; and an Electronic Paper Collection, currently containing over 233,400 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications.
