05 March 2010

Open Access repositories can hold digital duplicates of published articles and make them freely available. Subject to copyright (see below) authors can deposit copies of their finished articles in repositories alongside their publication in journals. The available evidence shows that this does not affect journal subscriptions. The EC Open Access Pilot and ERC Guidelines on Open Access follow this scenario; they require that the official publication resulting from research, funded by them, is also available Open Access.

In addition to this, many Open Access repositories also contain other materials. For example, if the subject discipline circulates un-refereed pre-prints or working papers in advance of publication (like Physics, or Economics), then these can be deposited. If an accepted method of communication is through conference papers (like Computer Science), then these can be deposited; similarly for fields that use book chapters or reports. Other fields like Biomedicine only circulate refereed post-prints. Repositories tag peer-reviewed material to make this status clear. The important point is that repositories reflect and support the existing research culture of the discipline.

The system works by these electronic versions of article, or eprints, being deposited into a database, or repository. These repositories are mainly administered by research institutions, which provide the advantage of local support of users. In some disciplines there are subject-based repositories (arXiv, PubMed, RePEc). Institutional repositories share records about their content with service providers, who then offer search services to users across every record that they hold. This means that a researcher using a search service is searching across all repositories, not just individual ones. Once the researcher finds a record, they can then view the full-text directly from the institutional repository. Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo and others also index repositories for their search engines; publications from repositories are usually ranked higher than those found on ordinary websites.

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