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What is a repository?

A repository may contain a wide variety of material that represents the academic output of an institution (e.g. journal articles, pre-prints, conference papers, working papers, theses, datasets), or they may just focus on one type of material (e.g. peer-reviewed papers).

Repositories can be institutionally based e.g. captuing the academic output of a particular university, or discipline based e.g. the e-print archive arXiv (for Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics). Use the re3data.org registry of research data repositories to find a suitable repository for your data. You can search for repositories by name, or browse them by subject, content type, or country.

Open access and repositories

Many repositories are open access, meaning that the material contained within it is free to access for everyone.

Researchers are now expected to comply with open access and open data requirements by depositing their accepted manuscripts and the data underpinning their research in repositories.  The University of Cambridge institutional repository is called Apollo (formerly D-Space) and you can deposit material here or you may be required to deposit it in a repository that your funder specifies. This is known as 'self-archiving'. Please visit our Open access publishing web pages for further information.

Lists of repositories worldwide

Please see the 'Related links' menu on the right-hand side of this page for links to lists of repositories. Note that the SHERPA website is slightly out of date with some broken links as a result but it is a good starting point. OpenDOAR appears to be kept much more current.

Remember that you can simply use Google or preferably Google Scholar to search for items you think may be deposited in a repository or to search for repositories in general.