UCF Research Guides: Open Access: Open Access Repositories

What are Open Access Repositories?

Open Access repositories preserve and provide free access to articles, monographs, data sets, audio, video and other media. Unlike traditional academic publishers, they do not provide editing or peer review services, although they may host and provide access to edited and/or peer-reviewed documents. Repositories, such as UCF's Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship (STARS), are often maintained by an institution for the benefit of its community of scholars and researchers. For example, STARS “exists to publicize, disseminate, and provide ready access to works by, for, and about the University of Central Florida. Administered by the UCF Libraries, STARS is available to host and promote research, creative activity, and institutional outputs to...

Ensure persistent access to your work
Increase discovery of UCF scholarship and creative endeavors
Foster scholarly collaborations with colleagues
Document and record UCF's history and progress
Discover open access materials and projects created by UCF authors
Allow you to share your work while retaining your copyright. If you own the copyright to your work, the copyright for materials uploaded to STARS remains with you.

Funding agencies often require that articles and/or data derived from the research they fund be deposited into an Open Access repository such as STARS. For more information on this, see the Data Management section of this guide.

STARS @ UCF

Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship (STARS)
UCF’s digital repository exists to publicize, disseminate, and provide ready access to works by, for, and about the University of Central Florida. Explore:
Journal Hosting in STARS
Several content management systems are available for hosting content. Take a look at our example collections and contact us to find out which one is the best fit for your project.
OA Journals in STARS

General Repositories

Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR)
The quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. You can search and browse through thousands of registered repositories based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
EPrints
Developed at the University of Southampton, EPrints has been providing stable, innovative repository services across the academic sector and beyond for over 15 years. We are proud of the stability, flexibility and pragmatism of our software.
Open Access Directory of Disciplinary Repositories
A list of OA repositories searchable by subject area.
Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank)
The OKR was created as a home for the Bank's research outputs. Upon launch, three years worth of publications were made available, but they are working on adding content retrospectively.
The Registry of Open AccessRepository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP)
A searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an open access repository.
Repository66.org Repository Maps
Repository66.org takes data from ROAR and OpenDOAR and graphs the repositories, using icons to indicate the repository’s size and software platform. Clicking on the icon provides a link to the repository, information about the repository, and a search box to search it via Google, Google Scholar or Microsoft Live. You may view the worldwide map, or zoom in on specific countries, and filter by software platform or date of founding.

Subject Specific Repositories

arXiv.org
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,773,365 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
BioRxiv
A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
Open Science Framework Preprint Repository
The Open Science Framework hosts repositories across the disciplines. They are leading the way in a new preprint revolution to facilitate open access to and community review of new research prior to publication.
PubMedCentral (PMC)
A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection.
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
A collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 102 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences.
Social Science Research Network
The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 281,400 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers; and an Electronic Paper Collection, currently containing over 233,400 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications.