Repositories
Repositories are collections of scholarly material and all into two main categories:
- Institutional repositories: archives for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution
- Themed repositories: repositories for collecting subject -specific or type-specific scholarly output.
Repositories are very good for providing access to scholarly material that otherwise might require payment to access. Repositories are good in general, but just make sure you know what you are reading: a piece of scholarly research published in a respected journal, or a student assignment that got 60% or above - you'll find both in institutional repositories. That isn't meant to be disparaging to student essays and assignments, but to simply remind users that institutional repositories may contain both kinds and it's more likely that users are looking for published scholarly research. Repositories are great for showcasing student work - which is great for the writer's CV and shows other students examples of both what an essay or assignment looks like and what is required to get a good mark. It's also worth mentioning that there are good quality peer-reviewed journals that are dedicated to publishing student work.
Institutional Repositories
- Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities, colleges and other institutions worldwide
EOLAS is an online repository for the Irish Further Education and Training (FET) sector maintained by the Digital Library of Education and Training Boards Ireland (ETBI). It aims to bring together, preserve, and provide free access to research and other output of ETBI and the 16 ETBs. If you have anything you think would fit here, contact the library
- The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories is a searchable and browsable collection of institutional and other repositories. Note: doesn't search for content.
- A platform for searching the content of institute of technology (IOT) repositories
Themed and Other Repositories
- Archive for papers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, and many areas of computer science, biology, medicine and other sciences that are relevant to the study of cognition
- A single European portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
- Journals, working papers & conferences in business studies and economics
- The British Library's e-theses online service. Search and download where available, doctoral theses awarded by UK universities
- An online open access repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, media (including video), papers (including pre-prints), posters, code, and filesets
- The Irish health research repository maintained by the HSE
- An international organisation dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. Search the 6,000,000 electronic theses and dissertations contained in the NDLTD archive
- Search for EC funded research outputs, many of which are full text
- The Social Science Research Network is a repository and international journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities and more. Formerly entirely open access, this now contains a mixture of free and paywalled material
- A general-purpose open-access repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. In addition to articles, it includes data sets, software and other research-related digital artifacts
