A repository in publishing, and especially in academic publishing,
is a real or virtual facility for the deposit of academic publications, such as academic journal articles.

Deposit of material in such a site may be mandatory for a certain group, such as a particular university's doctoral graduates in a thesis repository, or published papers from those holding grants from a particular government agency in a subject repository, or, sometimes, in their own institutional repository. Or it may be voluntary, as usually the case for technical reports at a university.

Organization

They can be organized in several different manners:

• A repository established by a particular university
  University
  A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
  
   or other research institution is known as an institutional repository
  Institutional repository
  An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....
  
  . It can be intended to collect and preserve—in digital
  Digital
  A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
  
   form—the intellectual output of an institution, as PhD
  PHD
  PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
  
   theses
  Thesis
  A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...
  
  , EngD theses, preprint
  Preprint
  A preprint is a draft of a scientific paper that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.-Role:Publication of manuscripts in a peer-reviewed journal often takes weeks, months or even years from the time of initial submission, because manuscripts must undergo extensive...
  
  s, postprints, working paper
  Working paper
  A working paper or work paper or workpaper may refer to:*A preliminary scientific or technical paper. Often, authors will release working papers to share ideas about a topic or to elicit feedback before submitting to a peer reviewed conference or academic journal.* Sometimes the term working paper...
  
  s, or technical report
  Technical report
  A technical report is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and conclusions of the research...
  
  s. It can also contain the institutions digital library
  Digital library
  A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...
  
  , the collection of printed and manuscript
  Manuscript
  A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
  
   documents, public archive
  Archive
  An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
  
  s, & graphic material, originating from the institution or elsewhere, that the university has converted to digital form for use within the university, and generally available to anyone. It can also contain the administrative output of the institution, as reports, directories, and local archival documentation. A well-developed example is the eScholarship Repository of the University of California Digital Library.

• A repository established for the use of a particular academic department
  Academic department
  An academic department is a division of a university or school faculty devoted to a particular academic discipline. This article covers United States usage at the university level....
  
   or laboratory
  Laboratory
  A laboratory is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. The title of laboratory is also used for certain other facilities where the processes or equipment used are similar to those in scientific laboratories...
  
   is properly called a departmental repository, though the term institutional repository is also used. An example is ePrints for the School of Electronics and Computer Science, The University of Southampton, UK.

• A repository established to collect and preserve material in a particular discipline or subject is called a disciplinary repository
  Disciplinary repository
  A disciplinary repository is a collection containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. The repository can be online and accept work from scholars across institutions in contrast to institutional repositories...
  
   or subject repository; they can be organized by a government, a government department, or by a research or academic institution, or be autonomous. Some of the best known are arXiv
  ArXiv
  The arXiv |Chi]], χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all...
  
   for mathematics and physics articles or reports, PubMed Central
  PubMed Central
  PubMed Central is a free digital database of full-text scientific literature in biomedical and life sciences. It grew from the online Entrez PubMed biomedical literature search system. PubMed Central was developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as an online archive of biomedical journal...
  
   for biomedical journal articles, and CiteSeerX
  CiteSeerX
  CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library and repository for scientific and academic papers with a focus on computer and information science. It is loosely based on the previous CiteSeer search engine and digital library and is built with a new open source infrastructure, SeerSuite,...
  
   for computer and information science articles and reports.

• A repository for general use by scholars working in a particular country is a national repository, but such repositories can also be organized on a more local basis. In the UK, the British Library
  British Library
  The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
  
   operates a national repository open to those who have no institutional repository

• A repository can also be intended for a particular type of material, such as a thesis repository or a newspaper
  Newspaper
  A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...
  
   repository.

See also

• e-Book
  E-book
  An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
  
  
• Electronic journal
  Electronic journal
  Electronic journals, also known as ejournals, e-journals, and electronic serials, are scholarly journals or intellectual magazines that can be accessed via electronic transmission. In practice, this means that they are usually published on the Web...
  
  
• Open access (publishing)
• Open Archives Initiative
  Open Archives Initiative
  The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...
  
  
• Referatory
  Referatory
  A referatory is the name given to a web application system . It provides information such as the name and description, reviews, and hyperlinks to resources or learning objects in a Publishing Repository. The repository provides the actual resource files, while the referatory is a website pointing...
  
  

Examples of repositories

• Australian Research Repositories Online to the World
• South African Institutional Repositories
  South African Institutional Repositories
  Institutional repositories provide online access to full text information and multimedia files. In general, open access is provided to the full text files linked to the entries...
  
  
• North Carolina Learning Object Repository

External links

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).
• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR).
• Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP)
• Making Institutional Repositories a Collaborative Learning Environment
• Open Access News by Peter Suber
  Peter Suber
  Peter Suber is the creator of the game Nomic and a leading voice in the open access movement. He is a senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, the open access project director at Public Knowledge, a senior researcher at SPARC , and a Fellow at Harvard's and...
  
  
• About the PURE application by Atira A/S
• Beyond Open Access: Open Discourse, the next great equalizer, Retrovirology 2006, 3:55
• Israel Scholar Works Archive
• Openarchives.eu - The European Guide to OAI-PMH Institutional Repositories in the World
• ePrints
• School of Electronics and Computer Science, The University of Southampton, UK