Repositories and Service Providers
SHERPA Search | SHERPA Repositories | Other UK Institutional Repositories | Central UK Repositories | Lists of Repositories | Service ProvidersSHERPA Search
SHERPA runs a set of simple full-text search facilities for SHERPA partner repositories and for all UK Open Access Repositories.
OpenDOAR, a SHERPA project, runs a full-text search service which searches all of the quality-assessed repositories that it lists in the OpenDOAR Directory
SHERPA Repositories
Partners
- University of Birmingham - EPrints Service
- University of Bristol - Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints (ROSE)
- British Library - EPrints
- University of Cambridge - DSpace @ Cambridge
- University of Durham - Durham E-Print Repository
- University of Edinburgh - Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA)
- University of Glasgow - Glasgow ePrints Service
- London LEAP Consortium
- Birkbeck College - Birkbeck ePrints
- Goldsmiths, University of London - Goldsmiths Eprints
- Imperial College - Imperial Eprints
- Kings College - King's ePrints
- LSE - LSE Research Online
- Royal Holloway - Royal Holloway Research Online
- School of Advanced Study - SAS-SPACE
- SOAS - SOAS Eprints
- School of Pharmacy - Pharmacy Eprints Pilot
- UCL - UCL Eprints
- University of Newcastle upon Tyne - Newcastle University Library E-Print Pilot
- University of Nottingham - Nottingham ePrints
- University of Oxford - Oxford Eprints
- White Rose Partnership - White Rose
Research Online
- University of Leeds
- University of Sheffield
- University of York
Affliate Partners
- Cranfield University - Cranfield QUEprints
- Sheffield Hallam University - Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive
- University of Leicester - Leicester Research Archive
- University of St Andrews - St Andrews Eprints
- CCLRC - (Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils ) - CCLRC ePublication Archive
Other UK Institutional Repositories
A fuller list of UK repositories is available from the OpenDOAR site. If your repository is not listed, please contact OpenDOAR.
A list of UK Insitutional Repositories and primary contacts for use by academic authors is also available.
Temporarily withdrawn
- University of Bath - Bath Eprints
- University of Warwick - CSC Eprints
Central UK Repositories
Lists of open access repositories
There are a number of other UK subject-based or project-based open access repositories available. These are listed in OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories.
- OpenDOAR - Our own database of open-access repositories
- Distribution of UK Higher Education Repositories - This web page is an analysis of available UK HE institutional repositories current at May 2006, broken down by existing groupings - the Russell Group, the 1994 Group and the top universities by research grant funding.
Other lists of open access archives are available from:
- ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories - from the University of Southampton
- The Open Archives Initiative - OAI-registered Data Providers
- The Open Citation Project - Core Metalist of Open Access Eprint Archives
- Eprints.org - A list of repositories that use EPrints software
Service Providers
Given the ready availability of open access full-text items spread in repositories around the world, "service providers" can grow up which give access to this information. These service providers can take different forms, but could be a subject-based gateway for example, which only draws from eprints or materials in a specific subject. This idea of service providers demonstrates one of the underlying concepts of open access repositories: for the purposes of using the material, it does not matter whether it is stored in a subject-based repository, an institutional repository or as part of the collection of an open access journal. What is of interest to the user is how they can discover it.
A good example of such a themed gateway is the Alexander Street Press resource In the First Person which gives access to diaries and other personal reflections. In this case, although this draws from a majority of open access materials, there are also some closed documents, but the principle is well demonstrated.
Other services are being built to analyse open access materials either individually or en masse - in citation analyses for example, or text-mining, data-mining and other innovations.
The fundamental service for repositories is of course search. The original concept of open access repositories was for services like search to be based on the metadata that describes each item. However, the success and power of Google and similar search engines means that there is now an alternative way of searching repositories through the use of the full text. Developments are being pursued using metadata descriptions to provide more powerful and sophisticated search services, with value-added features like subject-specification, filter by version or material type, personalisation, etc.
A list of "Service Providers" that search OAI repositories using metadata through the OIA-PMH standard is available from www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html. Such search services include:
Many repositories can also be searched as full-text through standard general search services such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. The Google Scholar service provides access to contents which have been filtered for "academic" content. This service is still developing and is beginning to search repositories. The Elsevier service Scirus searches both closed and open access databases for scientific information.
OpenDOAR provides a full-text search service using a freely available Google derivative to define searches by the quality-assured repositories listed by OpenDOAR . This means that the results are more tightly focussed than Google or Google Scholar, as the repositories which are used have been assessed for academic value and for open access to their contents by OpenDOAR staff.