Scholarly Repositories

Scholarly repositories preserve and disseminate scholarly research in many forms. By uploading papers to scholarly repositories, professors can immediately share them with colleagues and other interested parties around the world. Globally, due to price restrictions, many researchers have access to only a small percentage of published research. Sharing  work through scholarly repositories, also known as "green" open access, dramatically expands potential readership and increases its impact. Numerous studies have shown an "open access citation advantage" (see https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268516/) across disciplines.

Scholarly repositories generally come in two forms: institutional repositories, which host scholarly materials produced by the faculty, students, and staff members of a particular school or other institution and disciplinary repositories, which gather together materials on a specific subject from scholars at many institutions.

The Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository  offers a convenient way to distribute your preprints, postprints, and published articles online and to share them with students and faculty at Vanderbilt and elsewhere. It also can store data sets and other supporting materials in compliance with open access data management plans required by granting institutions. By uploading materials into the Institutional Repository, your work will benefit from attention by professional catalogers who will help your materials get found and accessed by others.

If you have questions about the process or would like to get started with the Institutional Repository, please contact us. We would be glad to speak with your department or school about the benefits of depositing and sharing scholarly materials in the Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository.