Thing 12: Open Access Repositories and WRAP

‘Green’ open access material is most often made available in databases referred to as ‘repositories’ or ‘research archives’. These databases can be an invaluable source of information. Researchers can use them to view papers they may not ordinarily have access to and evaluate if they need to go to the expense of acquiring the final published version. These databases come in three major forms:

• Aggregator repositories,
• Subject based repositories and
• Institutional repositories.

Aggregator repositories bring together the records from a number of smaller repositories in a single user interface and subject repositories, as the name suggests, focus on a single subject area or discipline. We are going to look at the final type of repository: the institutional repository. These cover outputs from a range of subjects but that are produced by the researchers of a single institution.



Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) and the linked University of Warwick Publications service serve the University of Warwick.

WRAP is the research archive for the University and hosts a range of research outputs including journal articles, PhD theses, conference papers, working papers, book chapters, reports and more. The Publications service complements WRAP by holding bibliographical references for material we cannot make publicly available, either because we do not have permission, or the permitted version of the work. WRAP and the Publications service create a showcase of the material produced by Warwick researchers and are both designed especially to maximise the visibility and impact of the material listed in the service. Both services are harvested by a range of aggregator repositories and have their content indexed by Google and Google Scholar.

The reach of the service is large and international: we had more than 29,000 visitors in October 2011 and the 5700 papers were downloaded more than 26,000 times. Visitors and users of materials come from all around the world as can be seen by the latest WRAP statistics. WRAP can also provide researchers with a range of usage metrics to help illustrate the impact of a paper.

Use WRAP to find information:
To complete this thing please follow the step-by-step instructions to set up an RSS feed for the new items added to WRAP or the Publications service for your department.

Additionally to Thing 12 you may wish to investigate some of the aggregator or subject based repositories . Most of those below will allow you to set up similar feeds for new material or material on a specific subject or set of search terms and are all useful tools to find research.

Good examples of aggregator repository are:

• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) hosted by the Bielefeld University Library and contains information from over 2000 databases and is international in scope.
• Intute Repository Search, mainly UK focused.

Not all subjects have dedicated repositories but there are few very well-known examples:

• ArXiv for physics, maths, statistics, computer science and others.
• Pub-Med Central and the related UK Pub-Med Central for biomedical and life sciences material.
• RePEC (link: ) for research papers in economics.
• SSRN (link: ) for social science material.

Further information:

• Repositories @ Warwick
• Benefits of a Repository from the JISC InfoKit.

Emma Cragg : 21 Nov 2011 09:09 |  Tags: Openaccess Theme5 Thing12 Wrap |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem