Subject and data repositories

Subject repositories are subject orientated collections of open access e-publications and research data from multiple institutions, which are free to users.

ROAR-MAP and OpenDOAR give details on the largest subject repositories on the web and are excellent resources for finding  subject repositories relevant to your discipline.

Brunel University London has its own institutional repository, BURA, which showcases staff research publications and doctoral theses.  Researchers also have the option to use external subject and data repositories to disseminate their work further. For information on how to deposit your research in BURA, visit BRAD and BURA.

Please see the details in the tabs below.


 

Document repositories are open access archives that hold a range of literature, including academic publications, pre-prints, working papers, postgraduate dissertations and theses. Typically these are self-archived by authors or archived on their behalf by publishers.

If the document is a published work, authors often archive the final draft manuscript following peer review with any corrections applied.   If a work has not been published, there may be an embargo period before the paper can be released for public viewing. However a public metadata record is released which should contain information about the expected release date and sometimes a means of requesting access directly from the author. 

Repositories also hold grey literature: outputs produced by government, academic institutions, business and industry in print and electronic formats, but which is not controlled by commercial publishers. These may include working papers.

Some libraries, museums and heritage organisations work to provide public access to out-of-copyright works in repositories and preserve collections of cultural, social or scientific value. 

The section below describes various types of repositories below.

Pre-print servers

Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, owing to the time required by editors and reviewers to evaluate and critique manuscripts, and the time required by authors to address critiques.

The need to quickly circulate current results within a scholarly community has led researchers to distribute documents known as pre-prints, which are manuscripts that have yet to undergo peer review.  The immediate distribution of preprints allows authors to receive early feedback from their peers, which may be helpful in revising and preparing articles for submission.

A pre-print server is a repository that has a special focus on collecting pre-prints before submission to a journal. The preprint may persist, often as a non-typeset version available free, after a paper is published in a journal.

These repositories take full advantage of under copyright law. Before a copyright transfer agreement has been signed and especially before the manuscript has been submitted to a commerical publisher, the author (or their institution depending on local policy and employment contract) retains full rights over their intellectual property. This means they can disseminate their research early and take and respond to comments from contributors.

Many researchers and funding organisations are recognising the value of early involvement by peers, the process acting as a kind of informal peer review. Many funders now consider pre-print publications when assessing grant applications.

Perhaps the most well known and largest preprint server is arXiv, which serves mathematics, physics and computer science. bioRxiv is a discipline specific preprint server covering Biology. OSF hosts several pre-print servers at https://osf.io/preprints.

Subject repositories

A subject repository is an online archive containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. Disciplinary repositories can accept work from scholars from any institution. A disciplinary repository shares the roles of collecting, disseminating, and archiving work with other repositories, but is focused on a particular subject area. These collections can include academic and research papers.

Disciplinary repositories can acquire their content in many ways. Many rely on author or organization submissions, such as SSRN. Others such as CiteSeerX crawl the web for scholar and researcher websites and download publicly available academic papers from those sites.

A disciplinary repository generally covers one broad based discipline, with contributors from many different institutions supported by a variety of funders; the repositories themselves are likely to be funded from one or more sources within the subject community. Deposit of material in a disciplinary repository is sometimes mandated by research funders.

Disciplinary repositories can also act as stores of data related to a particular subject, allowing documents along with data associated with that work to be stored in the repository.

Academic social networking websites

Among some of the most popular social networking sites for researchers are Academia.edu and ResearchGate which offer services to the global research community.

In addition to the ability to build research social networks, users may post versions of their research paper in the same way as other repositories.

Academic social media platforms are not considered the best means to preserve academic research for long term access as they do not currently meet technical standards required by funders and institutions. However, they can be useful tools for connecting to researchers and sharing research. Scholarly sharing on such platforms is not always permitted by publishers under copyright laws, or they may have conditions, so it is important to verify their individual guidance for authors before posting your research papers on these websites. 

The University requires that all research publications are archived in BURA, in addition to any other repositories required by funders or which are standard for a discipline to maximise the reach and visibility of your research.

Subject or institutional repositories will follow copyright verification workflows who ensure that copyright and access requirements are met and, therefore, that papers have no reason to be removed.

 

Open access repositories work within copyright law to legally disseminate academic works, making them freely accessible to researchers and the the public. This is because when copyright has been transferred to a commercial publisher they, as the rightsholder, often put restrictions on how the work may be used in repositories.

This diagram here originally published by HEFCE highlights the publishing workflow and indicates some of kinds of document versions you would expect to find regarding current research.

It is not uncommon to find all these document versions in repositories; it depends on what the rightsholder allows. The accepted post-print and published versions are the most valuable, because these have are subject to formal peer-review.

HEFCE

 

 How do I access repositories relating to my subject?

Often a google search is the quickest way to find these repositories. All repository contents are indexed by Google Scholar. ROAR-MAP and OpenDOAR which provide details on where to the largest subject repositories on the web. These resources is an excellent way of locating subject repositories relevant to your discipline.