Open Access Repositories

Adelaide Research and Scholarship

Adelaide Research & Scholarship (AR&S) is the University of Adelaide’s institutional repository.

AR&S aims to collect together into one place the research and scholarship of members of the University community. It provides a platform for the collection, organisation, access and preservation of scholarly outputs from the University. AR&S contains journal articles, books, book chapters, theses, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and more.

All University staff and higher degree students are encouraged to deposit their research outputs into AR&S. All works are validated and approved by Library staff before being made available, staff confirm that all the information about the work is correct (i.e. metadata) and that it can legally be made available open access (i.e. copyright compliance).

Works are deposited via Aurora.

Figshare

Figshare is the University of Adelaide’s data and digital object repository. It can be used to preserve and share research outputs from staff and higher degree students of the University. This includes figures, datasets, software/code, images, videos, poster and presentations.

For more information visit the University of Adelaide’s Figshare website.

Other institutional repositories

All other Australian universities, the majority of international universities and some research organisations also maintain institutional open access repositories. If you are collaborating with researchers from other organisations then it is possible that research outputs might be deposited in multiple institutional repositories.   

A list of Australasian open access repositories is available from the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group.

The primary aim of a discipline based repository is to collect and make available the scholarly output in a given field. These can also be referred to as a subject based repository. Examples of well-known discipline based repositories include arXiv for physics and PubMed Central for medicine.

For a global list of open access repositories visit the Directory of Open Access Repositories or the Open Access Directory. 

Scholarly networking sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu are platforms whose primary aim is to connect researchers with common interests. While they offer some benefits to researchers they are not considered to be open access repositories and do not meet the requirements of institutional or funder open access policies.

Institutional or discipline based repositories are generally non-profit whereas scholarly networking sites are commercial entities whose business models include selling advertising, job postings and potentially data. This means that while they do not support interoperability, harvesting of research data or preservation they will generally try to access your contact list, personal data and send you notifications. 

Authors may choose to self-archive a copy of their research on a personal or departmental website. This may be desirable for researchers who already have their own site or blog and an existing reader base. However, a personal or departmental website is not considered to be an open access repository. There may be limitations to the discovery of outputs and it is likely that the lifespan will be significantly shorter than that of an open access repository. It is generally better to additionally deposit the work in an institutional or discipline based repository and link to the work.