Open access archives & repositories

Institutional archives & repositories are part of the self-archiving open access strategy and usually focus on the literature produced by one or more institutions.

An institutional archive usually contains eprints written by scholars from a range departments, research centers, or other units. An institutional repository usually includes a variety of materials produced by scholars from a range of units, such as eprints, technical reports, theses and dissertations, data sets and teaching materials. Some institutional repositories are also being used to publish ebooks and ejournals.

Typically, open access archives & repositories do not perform peer review, however, deposit may be limited to pieces in the right discipline or authors from the right institution. ePrint archives and institutional repositories can be searched and browsed and can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. eScholarship Repository for the University of California).

The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a global registry of open access (research) repositories. Every open access research repository should be registered with ROAR. It provides a wealth of information about repositories, including breakdowns by country and software.