There are searchable registries and aggregators of Open Access Repositories.
Registry of Open Access Repositories is a registry of Open Access repositories around the world, including subject, institutional, and national repositories. Searchable by subject area, repository type or geographically.
Directory of Open Access Repositories is a directory with more than 2,500 Open Access repositories from 109 countries. Searchable by subject area, repository type, or geographically.
Preprint citations should include the author name(s), title, preprint server, the Preprint] ‘tag’, the document version (e.g. most recent date modified), the date the preprint was cited, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and should follow the BMJ reference style.
Example: Rostami A, Sepidarkish M, Leeflang M, et al. First snap-shot meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence of serum antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in humans. MedRxiv 20185017 [Preprint]. September 02, 2020 [cited 2020 Sep 20] https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.31.20185017.
Open Access Repositories are freely accessible online digital archives hosting research outputs that are deposited directly by authors (known as self-archiving). Repositories are designed to store, preserve and provide access to research outputs in perpetuity. The full text content and metadata is harvestable by search engines and other discovery services.
There are several main types of Open Access Repositories:
Institutional Repositories - research output from a particular institution (eg the University of California's eScholarship)
Disciplinary Repositories - output from scholars in a particular discipline (eg CORE for the humanities or SocArXiv for the social sciences)
Format Repositories - content such as data, code or educational resources (eg Data Dryad or OER Commons)
This a list of some of the largest and most well known Open Access Repositories and search engines.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers including most of the repositories listed below. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
SciELO is a bibliographic database, digital library, and cooperative electronic publishing model of open access journals and preprints. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries and provides an efficient way to increase visibility and access to scientific literature.
arXiv Pre-print repository hosted by Cor nell University covers scholarship in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics, and statistics.
OSF Preprints is a Pre-prints discovery site that searches over 2 million pre-prints hosted on OSF and from partner sites such as arXiv, engrXiv, and PsyArXiv.
EarthArXiv has partnered with the California Digital Library (part of the University of California system) as the server host and submission platform (formerly partnered with COS). The CDL also supports eScholarship, the UC's repository for UC produced scholarship and research.
RePEc Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics. More than 2000 archives have contributed over 2 million research pieces to the repository.
The Redalyc project is a bibliographic database and a digital library of Open Access journals, supported by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México with the help of numerous other higher education institutions and information systems.
CORE is an interdisciplinary open access repository for the humanities. Scholars can deposit their course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, digital projects.
PubMed Central is a full-text, open access database with articles from the biomedical and life science disciplines. PubMed Central is administered by the National Library of Medicine .
MedRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server founded by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Yale University, and the BMJ. Included are complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences.
bioRxiv is modeled after ArXiv, this repository is a pre-print archive for the biological sciences. Administered by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
SocOpen is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach people more effectively, to improve our research, and build the future.
DISA (Digital Innovation South Africa) is a freely accessible online scholarly resource focusing on the socio-political history of South Africa, particularly the struggle for freedom during the period from 1950 to the first democratic elections in 1994, providing a wealth of material on this fascinating period of the country’s history.
