Digital Repositories

Publications, even if they were originally published in a subscription based journal can also be made open access by their inclusion in an open access repository. These repositories make their content freely available and searchable through engines such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Live Academic, and OAIster. In addition to journal articles, a repository may also contain items such as conference proceedings, images, maps, datasets, newsletters, and other "grey literature" that is scholarly in nature.

The Texas A&M Digital Repository is an open access repository which archives and preserves the academic output of the Texas A&M community.  In addition to open access, a further benefit of our repository is the dedication to the preservation of the contents of the repository. Permanent and persistent access to the information that it contains will be maintained. This repository is managed by the Texas A&M University Libraries, and all faculty researchers are invited to use the repository. To find out more, or to begin a collection in the repository, please contact Jay Koenig at 862-3887 or jkoenig@tamu.edu.

Further, there are many subject-based national repositories such as PubMedCentral (medicine) and arXiv (physics). You can find many more repositories at the Directory of Open Access Repositories.

Authors must use caution, however, as they can only use this path to open access if they have retained the right to do so in their publication agreement. Many publications now acknowledge the author's interests in making their articles open access, and allow their authors to do so through repositories. The SHERPA group has compiled a list of publishers' open access policies at its RoMEO website.