University publishing opportunities have burgeoned with the development of the world wide web. A wide range of campus units including libraries have begun publishing digital works - new genres and traditional forms.
Increasingly common at research institutions, digital repositories provide free, online access to scholarly materials and can be organized by discipline or by institution. Some open access repositories accept all types of scholarly materials, including pre-publication materials, journals and peer-reviewed series, seminar series papers, post-prints, and more. Most digital archives comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, which makes them interoperable and cross-searchable. Users can find a work in an OAI-compliant archive without knowing which archives exist, where they are located, or what they contain.
Institutional Repository Examples
Disciplinary Repository Examples
ArXiv: For physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology. Operated by Cornell University
PubMed Central: A digital archive of life sciences journal literature deposited by publishers. Developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine
CogPrints: An electronic self-archive for papers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology, and other areas that relate to the study of cognition. Developed by the University of Southampton, England
RePEC: Research Papers in Economics provides a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available.
SSRN: Social Science Research Network's eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database and an Electronic Paper Collection. It is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
