Open Access Repositories are freely accessible online digital archives hosting research outputs that are deposited directly by authors (known as self-archiving). Repositories are designed to store, preserve and provide access to research outputs in perpetuity. The full text content and metadata is harvestable by search engines and other discovery services.
There are two main types of Open Access Repositories:
Institutional Repositories - research output from a particular institution (eg DSpace@MIT)
Disciplinary Repositories- research from scholars in a particular discipline regardless of institutional affiliation. (eg Social Science Research Network)
Struggling to find the right Open Access Repository? There are online platforms that offer searchable databases of Open Access Repositories.
Registry of Open Access Repositories
A registry of Open Access repositories around the world, including subject, institutional, and national repositories. Searchable by subject area, repository type or geographically.
Directory of Open Access Repositories
Directory with more than 2,500 Open Access repositories from 109 countries. Searchable by subject area, repository type, or geographically.
This a list of some of the biggest and most important Open Access Repositories and search engines.
A Pre-prints discovery site that searches over 2 million pre-prints hosted on OSF and from partner sites such as arXiv, engrXiv, and PsyArXiv.
Over 2 million full-text scholarly articles and other research works from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
PubMed Central is a full-text, open access database with articles from the biomedical and life science disciplines. PubMed Central is administered by the National Library of Medicine .
Social Science Research Network
SSRN is a trusted open access pre-print repository of scholarly research from the social sciences. Databases contains over 800,000 searchable and downloadable articles.
Pre-print repository hosted by Cornell University covers scholarship in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics, and statistics.
Modeled after ArXiv, this repository is a pre-print archive for the biological sciences. Administered by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics. More than 2000 archives have contributed over 2 million research pieces to the repository.