Open Access Repositories explained

There are three kinds of Open Access Repositories.

1. Institutional Repositories collect the publications by researchers at the host institution. ResearchOnline@JCU is the JCU institutional repository.

• Institutional repositories have well defined collection goals i.e. the publications by researchers at the host institution.
• Use ResearchOnline@JCU to easily search for publications by others – check out the publications for Schools, Research Centres or individual colleagues. You can also see which journals others are publishing in.

2. Subject or Discipline Repositories contain publications about particular fields of research. Records are added to subject repositories through author deposits or harvesting from other repositories. OAD, the Open Access Directory, provides a comprehensive list of subject repositories. Some particularly successful repositories include:

• arXiv is an e-print service for the physical sciences which has been in operation for more than 20 years.
• SSRN: the Social Science Research Network is a highly successful repository, currently containing over 362, 200 downloadable full text documents.
• PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). It contains over 2.5 million articles, including full participation form 1156 journals.

3. Generic Repositories and Search Engines harvest publication records from other repositories and provide links back to the source repository. Examples include:

• Google Scholar is the probably the best known example
• Trove is the National Library of Australia’s search service. All ResearchOnline@JCU records are indexed in Trove.
• OAIster is a catalogue of millions of records collected from worldwide harvesting of Open Access collections.

For more information, contact the Research Services Librarian, Jackie Wolstenholme or the Digital Repository Librarian, Jo Ruxton.