Disciplinary repository

A disciplinary repository is a collection containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area^[1][2]. The repository can be online and accept work from scholars across institutions in contrast to institutional repositories. A disciplinary repository shares the roles of collection, dissemination and archive of work with other repositories, but is focused on a particular area. These collections can include academic and research papers.

Disciplinary repositories can acquire their content in many ways. Many reply on author or organization submissions, such as SSRN. Others such as CiteSeerX crawl the web for scholar and researcher websites and download publicly available academic papers from those sites. AgEcon, established in 1995^[3], grew as a result of active involvement of academia and societies.

A disciplinary repository generally covers one broad based discipline, with contributors from many different institutions supported by a variety of funders; the repositories themselves are likely to be funded from one or more sources within the subject community^[4]. It is speculated that there are more disciplinary libraries in history, geography and regional studies than in science, engineering and technology.

Disciplinary repositories can also act as stores of data related to a particular subject, allowing documents along with data associated with that work to be stored in the repository.

What was believed to be the first public Workshop on Disciplinary Repositories^[5] was held on June 16 and 17, 2011, at the ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Examples of Disciplinary Repositories

• AgEcon: Agriculture and Applied Economics
• ADS: Astrophysics
• arXiv: Physics
• CiteSeerX: Computer and Information Science
• Dryad: Biosciences
• INSPIRE: High-Energy Physics
• PhilPapers: Philosophy
• PubMed: Medicine
• RePEc: Economics
• SSRN: Social Sciences

References

1. ^ "The Internet and Unrefereed Scholarly Publishing". 2003. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/166/WP03-01B.html?sequence=1. Retrieved 2010-12-01. 
2. ^ "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age". 2003. http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml. Retrieved 2010-12-14. 
3. ^ "AgEcon Search: An International Disciplinary Repository". 2009. http://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/28460. Retrieved 2010-12-01. 
4. ^ "Development of Disciplinary Repositories: A Case Study of Open DOAR". 2010. http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in/dxml/handle/1944/987. Retrieved 2010-11-20. 
5. ^ "Digital Repositories and Field-Specific Digital Libraries: Opportunities and Challenges". 2011. http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=132638. Retrieved 2011-6-22. 

• Disciplinary repositories