Open access subject repositories: An overview

Subject repositories are open web collections of working papers or manuscript copies of published scholarly articles, specific to particular scientific disciplines. The first repositories emerged in the early 1990s, and in some fields of science they have become an important channel for the dissemination of research results. With quite strict inclusion criteria, 56 subject repositories were identified from a much larger number indexed in 2 repository indices. A closer study of these demonstrated a huge variety in sizes, organizational models, functions, and topics. When they first started to emerge, subject repositories catered to a strong market demand, but the later development of Internet search engines, the rapid growth of institutional repositories, and the tightening of journal publisher open access policies seems to be slowing their growth.