Informationsplattform Open Access: Repositories

A distinction is made between institutional and disciplinary repositories. Institutional repositories are document servers operated by institutions (mainly university libraries, other infrastructural institutions, or research organisations) that enable their members to digitally publish scholarly documents. Disciplinary depositories, by contrast, are trans-institutional. They are available to scientists and scholars to publish and archive their works on specific subjects, for example, in a specialist discipline. Examples are media/rep/, an open access repository for publications in the field of media studies; Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) for the social sciences; PubMed Central for the biomedical and life sciences; and arXiv for scholarly articles, especially from the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science.