Guidance from the Open Access Directory on suitable repositories for research in a range of disciplines
The registry of research data repositories
This resource is licenced under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence by Claire Sewell, the Office of Scholarly Communication, Cambridge University Libraries.
Although many researchers would like their acceptance email to be the end of the publication process, in reality it is just the start of a whole new stage. Once an output has been published it needs to be shared in some way. The traditional way of doing this is through formal publication in either a journal, an academic monograph or at a conference but recently the options for sharing have grown (something this resource touched on in the units on Research Data Management and Open Access). Research funders have also increased their demands on researchers to share both their finished outputs and the information underpinning them as part of the Open Research agenda and authors must make a wide impact with their work leading to a wide range of options for sharing from journal articles to blogs.
Exactly how research is shared with a wider audience will depend on both local circumstances, funder mandates and the nature of the output. Something all researchers should be aware of is the requirement to deposit their work in a repository. This is an online database of information and can house material in a variety of formats.
In order to make work openly available it needs to be deposited in an online repository. Many researchers are confused about Open Access as they believe that they have made their work available by adding it to online research sharing sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu but there is more to Open Access than just putting something online. A repository is a store of information and can house materials in a variety of formats from book chapters and articles to data and presentations. There are repositories dedicated to specific types of output, subject based repositories and those which showcase the outputs from a particular institution. Repositories commit to ongoing preservation and access to materials unlike commercial academic social networking sites which could withdraw access or change their conditions at any time. Using non-repository sites to share work often infringes copyright and publishers have recently started to demand that works uploaded outside of their specific terms are taken down. It is important that both researchers and library staff realise this distinction. Although some funders will mandate that outputs from projects they fund are deposited in a particular repository the institutional repository is the most usual.
