Institutional Repository Guide

Institutional repositories (IRs) are university-run digital archives that store and provide open access to their researchers' scholarly output — dissertations, journal articles, conference papers, datasets, and technical reports. Subject repositories like arXiv, bioRxiv, SSRN, and RePEc serve similar functions for specific disciplines. Together, they form a distributed network of open scholarship that complements commercial databases.

This guide covers how to discover, access, and systematically harvest content from institutional and subject repositories for literature reviews, meta-analyses, and research data collection.

Repository Landscape

Types of Repositories

Institutional Repositories (IR):
  - Run by universities to archive their researchers' output
  - Examples: DSpace, EPrints, Fedora-based systems
  - Discovery: OpenDOAR directory (v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar)

Subject Repositories:
  - Discipline-specific archives
  - arXiv (physics, CS, math), bioRxiv, SSRN, RePEc, EarthArXiv

Aggregators:
  - Harvest from many repositories into a single search interface
  - BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
  - CORE (core.ac.uk, 200M+ open access articles)
  - OpenAIRE (European research output)

Discovering Repositories

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) is the primary registry for finding institutional repositories:

import urllib.request
import json

def search_opendoar(subject: str = None, country: str = None) -> list:
    """
    Search the OpenDOAR registry for institutional repositories.

    Args:
        subject: Filter by subject area (e.g., "Biology", "Computer Science")
        country: ISO country code (e.g., "US", "GB", "CN")
    """
    base_url = "https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/cgi/retrieve"
    params = "?item-type=repository&format=Json"
    if subject:
        params += f"&filter=[[\"{subject}\",\"subject\"]]"
    if country:
        params += f"&filter=[[\"{country}\",\"country\"]]"

    req = urllib.request.Request(base_url + params)
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(req)
    data = json.loads(response.read())

    repositories = []
    for item in data.get("items", []):
        repo_info = {
            "name": item.get("repository_metadata", {}).get("name", [{}])[0].get("name", ""),
            "url": item.get("repository_metadata", {}).get("url", ""),
            "oai_url": item.get("repository_metadata", {}).get("oai_url", ""),
            "software": item.get("repository_metadata", {}).get("software", {}).get("name", ""),
            "type": item.get("repository_metadata", {}).get("type", "")
        }
        repositories.append(repo_info)

    return repositories