Research Impact Challenge: Day 3

What is today's challenge? Learn about scholarly repositories for research outputs and research data and explore a specific repository that is relevant to your field.

What are repositories and why would you want to use them?

• A scholarly repository is an online archive for articles and other scholarly outputs.
• There are two kinds of scholarly repositories: institutional repositories and disciplinary repositories.
• Some repositories concentrate on scholarly outputs such as journal or conference papers, or presentations, while others concentrate on data or computer code. Some repositories will include all the above kinds of scholarly outputs.  
• For our purposes, we will think of them as basically article vs. data repositories.  

The benefits of article repositories: For article repositories, self-archiving or depositing your work in institutional or disciplinary repositories: 

• Leads to recognition, visibility, and wider dissemination of your work.
• Empowers you as an author to retain your self-archiving rights. 
• Reliable and stable links to your work.

Types of Repositories

• There are two types of repositories:
  • Institutional (e.g., YorkSpace)
  • Subject / Discipline-specific pre-print servers (e.g,, arXiv, SocArXiv, medRxiv, RePEc, etc.)
• The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) is the best source for information for finding subject or discipline specific repositories.
• Tip! Check the Day 2 section on Sherpa Romeo for more information on which article versions can be posted to a repository.

What is YorkSpace? YorkSpace is the university's institutional repository. Faculty, postdoctoral researchers, students, and staff are encouraged to use YorkSpace to preserve their scholarly research outputs in an institutional context. Learn more about YorkSpace and how it can help you self-archive your work.

Subject Repositories: Some of the most useful and popular disciplinary repositories for articles are:

• Physics, math, computer science, computational biology: arXiv
• Biology & life sciences: bioRxiv
• Clinical & social impacts of medicine: medRxiv
• Social science: SocArXiv
• Economics: RePEc

Data Repositories:

• Data repositories allow you to share your research data publicly and organize research data in a logical manner.
• York has an institutional data repository called Dataverse.
• Some general data repositories that cover a range of subjects, include:
  • Zenodo
  • figshare
  • Open Science Framework

Finding Data Repositories:

• Re3data is a directory of data repositories across all disciplines.
• York University Libraries also maintains a list of discipline-specific data repositories.
• The University of Pittsburgh maintains a list of discipline-specific data repositories.
• Nature has a collection of science data repositories.
• SIMBAD is a data repository for astronomy.
• The Qualitative Data Repository provides a repository for qualitative and mixed methods research data for the social sciences.
• Archaeology Data Service is a data repository for archaeology and historic environment data.

Complete today's challenge!

• Step 1: Select one of your recent research outputs (e.g., data file, presentation, video, journal or conference article).
• Step 2: Review some of the resources from today's challenge and select a repository that would be a good place to share your research output. Don't forget to use OpenDOAR for finding article repositories or re3data for research data repositories.
• Step 3: Fill out the challenge form (click below button) to show that you completed today’s challenge.

Need help with YorkSpace or research data repositories? Email diginit@yorku.ca for help with YorkSpace and email yul_rdm@yorku.ca for help with research data repositories.