Institutional Repository Guide

Institutional repositories (IRs) are university-run digital archives that store and provide open access to their researchers' scholarly output — dissertations, journal articles, conference papers, datasets, and technical reports. Subject repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and RePEc serve similar functions for specific disciplines. Together, they form a distributed network of open scholarship that complements commercial databases.

This guide covers how to discover, access, and systematically harvest content from institutional and subject repositories for literature reviews, meta-analyses, and research data collection.

Repository Landscape

Types of Repositories

Institutional Repositories (IR):
  - Run by universities to archive their researchers' output
  - Examples: DSpace, EPrints, Fedora-based systems
  - Discovery: OpenDOAR directory (v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar)

Subject Repositories:
  - Discipline-specific archives
  - arXiv (physics, CS, math), bioRxiv, SSRN, RePEc, EarthArXiv