OPEN ACCESS - KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL | HOME PAGE

Open access repositories are databases of digital archives freely accessible online. There are two types of open access repositories:

• Discipline-specific repositories (e.g. arXiv which is an archive for scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics).
• Institutional repositories, which are usually developed and supported by a scholarly organization or research institution, and contain the institution's intellectual capital (e.g. eSholarship Repository developed by California Digital Library). They are open and interoperable.

The services of open access repositories are:

• Capture
• Storage
• Indexing
• Preservation and
• Redistribution of academic and research digital archives.

The idea of open access repositories was prompted by certain initiatives about the efficient dissemination of content, such as the Open Archives Initiative and ‘self-archiving initiative'.

Benefits

Self-archiving in institutional repositories:

• Offers direct access to research results for everyone
• Is an easy process that neither takes up a lot of time, nor requires technical skills
• Maximizes the visibility, usage and impact of the research results
• Broadens the knowledge network through harvesting and article indexing
• Is a secure way for the authors to preserve their work
• Can give access to added-value services concerning usage and citation information
• Empowers the institution's status and value by showing it's scientific output.

What kind of material can be archived?

• Articles (preprints, postprints, published articles)
• Conference, symposium and seminar material (proceedings, papers, posters)
• Theses and Dissertations
• Book chapters
• Books
• Monographs
• Reports (research, technical)
• Working papers
• Course materials
• Datasets or raw research material
• Software
• Statistical and experimental data