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Open Access: Examples of Open Access Repositories & Archives

Resources and Information about the Open Access Movement

Open Access Mandates / Requirements

A growing number of academic institutions around the world have enacted policies to require the deposit of journal articles and other scholarly works to their institutional repositories. These policies can be adopted at departmental, faculty or institutional levels. The Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) is a searchable international registry providing a collection of links to such policies, charting the growth of open access mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders.

Selected Repository Directories

The Association of African Universities (AAU) has implemented a harvester DATAD-R (Database of African Theses and Dissertations and Research) to harvest African Repositories.  The collections of 4 communities (AAU Repository, Africa Centre of Excellence Scholarly Output, Research Africa & Theses/Dissertations) are available on the DSpace Repository. 

A directory of South African Academic Open-Access Repositories on the OpenDOAR platform.

  • Zenodo is a general-purpose open-access repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. It allows researchers to deposit data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artifacts

Selected Examples of Open Access Disciplinary/Subject Repositories

  • AquaDocs is the joint open access repository of the UNESCO/IOC InternationaI Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) and the International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers (IAMSLIC) with support from the FAO Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts. It is a thematic repository covering the natural marine, coastal, estuarine /brackish and fresh water environments and includes all aspects of the science, technology, management and conservation of these environments, their organisms and resources, and the economic, sociological and legal aspects. [see About].
  • arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,788,796 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
  • Bioline International is a non-profit cooperative that operates an online platform for sharing works by peer-reviewed open access bioscience journals published in developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. This includes meta data, abstracts, and individual articles in pdf and html.
  • bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. 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.
  • The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) is a service which de-identifies and hosts a large archive of medical images of cancer accessible for public download. 

  • CiteSeerx is an evolving scientific literature digital library and search engine that has focused primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerx aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge. Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries.

  • Cogprints (Cognitive Sciences ePrint Archive) an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.

  • The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types.  Dryad originated from an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies to adopt a joint data archiving policy (JDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that open, easy-to-use, not-for-profit, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support such a policy. These remain our guiding principles.  Dryad’s vision is to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge.

  • EarthArXiv is both a preprint server and a volunteer community devoted to open scholarly communication. As a preprint server, EarthArXiv publishes articles from all subdomains of Earth Science and related domains of planetary science. 

  • EconStor is a publication server for scholarly economic literature, provided as a non-commercial public service by the ZBW. The full texts collected here (mostly working papers, but also journal articles, conference proceedings, etc.) are all freely accessible according to the principles of Open Access. Authors and editors can also submit papers to EconStor free of charge.  EconStor is among the largest repositories in its discipline with 202,886. full-texts, and it regularly reaches top positions in international rankings. More than 500 institutions use it for the digital dissemination of their publications in Open Access. EconStor is also an important input service for RePEc, where it is one of the most highly frequented archives. Moreover we also distribute our titles to search engines like Google, Google Scholar or BASE and to academic databases like WorldCat, OpenAire and EconBiz.

  • Europe PMC is an open science platform that enables access to a worldwide collection of life science publications and preprints from trusted sources around the globe.  Europe PMC is developed by EMBL-EBI. It is a partner of PubMed Central and a repository of choice for many international science funders.  Free, transparent, and community-driven, Europe PMC is your gateway to life science research.

  • figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.

  • Frontiers is Open Science High quality open access publishing and research networking.  Frontiers is an online platform for the scientific community to publish open-access articles and network with colleagues.  Fast, open-access publication.  Rigorous peer-review in real-time thanks to our interactive, online interface.  Detailed metrics to follow the impact of articles.  A networking platform made especially for the scientific community.

  • The open archive HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne) is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields.  Researchers can connect their HAL research output with their ORCID via the Add Works 'Search & Link' option.

  • INSPIRE is a trusted community hub that helps researchers to share and find accurate scholarly information in high energy physics.

  • Medrxiv is an Internet site distributing unpublished eprints about health sciences. It distributes complete but unpublished manuscripts in the areas of medicine, clinical research, and related health sciences without charge to the reader.
  • OpenSALDRU Publications Repository The Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit digital repository collections contain publications from research conducted within the research unit.

  • PsyArXiv was a preprint repository for the psychological sciences opened in September 2016 and officially launched in December 2016. It was hosted by the Center for Open Science. The preprint service was inspired by the arXiv repository.

  • PubMed Central is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, PubMed Central is more than a document repository.
  • RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 101 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, all maintained by volunteers.
  • SocArXiv is an online preprint server for the social sciences founded by sociologist Philip N. Cohen in partnership with the non-profit Center for Open Science. It is an Open archive based on the ArXiv preprint server model used by physicists.
  • The Social Science Open Access Repository is a database specialising in scholarly articles from the social sciences which is freely accessible on the Internet. SSOAR is a full-text server, and Internet users can access full-text versions of documents free of charge and without prior registration. 
  • The SSRN, formerly known as Social Science Research Network, is both a repository for preprints and international journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities and more. Elsevier bought SSRN from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. in May 2016.
  • Treesearch Treesearch is an online system for locating and delivering publications by Research and Development scientists in the United States Forest Service. Publications in the collection include research monographs published by the agency as well as papers written by Forest Service scientists but published by other organizations in their journals, conference proceedings, or books. Research results behind these publications have been peer reviewed to ensure the best quality science. More than 23,000 publications are available in the database. (Updated regularly : 2004 to present).
  • UNESCO Open Access Publications For UNESCO, adopting an Open Access Policy means to make thousands of its publications freely available to the public. Furthermore, Open Access is also a way to provide the public with an insight into the work of the Organization so that everyone is able to discover and share what UNESCO is doing.

  • the World Bank website provides an invaluable source of information about the Bank itself and the services that it offers to developing countries throughout the world.  It gives access to the Bank’s publications as well as providing information and statistical data about the projects, programmes and research in which the Bank is involved.

  • The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.