Direct comparison
Institutional vs. Subject Repository
IR holds one institution's outputs across every field; a subject repository holds one field's outputs from any institution, anywhere.
Side-by-side comparison
| Dimension | Institutional Repository | Subject Repository |
|---|---|---|
| What it collects | The research outputs of one institution's own researchers, across every discipline they work in | Research outputs in one specific field, from any researcher anywhere, regardless of institutional affiliation |
| Who can deposit | Faculty, staff, students, and (at some institutions) alumni of the host institution | Any researcher working in the covered subject area, worldwide — no institutional affiliation required |
| Typical operator | The institution itself, usually run by the university library on platforms such as DSpace, EPrints, or Fedora | A disciplinary community, scholarly society, non-profit consortium, or funder-run infrastructure |
| Disciplinary scope | Multidisciplinary — spans every field the institution researches | A single field or a closely related cluster of fields |
| Well-known examples | A university's own DSpace- or EPrints-based repository, run by that institution's library for its own affiliated authors | arXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science), PubMed Central (biomedical and life-sciences literature), SSRN (economics, law, social sciences) |
| Typical content | Electronic theses and dissertations, journal postprints, working papers, and often institutional grey literature | Preprints and postprints in the covered field; scope is defined by subject matter, not document type |
| Long-term persistence | Tied to the host institution's ongoing funding and IT commitment — can be at risk if institutional support lapses or a program is discontinued | Backed by a scholarly community, non-profit, or funder rather than a single institution — can outlast any one contributor's affiliation, though it carries its own funding risk |
| Role in funder open-access mandates | A commonly accepted green open-access deposit location — several funder policies accept deposit in "an institutional or disciplinary repository" interchangeably | Often the required route for specific funders: NIH mandates deposit in PubMed Central, and NSF mandates deposit in NSF-PAR, for the manuscripts each agency funds |
| Discovery path | Indexed via the institution's own OAI-PMH feed and aggregated by services like BASE or CORE — discoverability depends on that one repository's metadata quality | A single, centralized destination researchers in that field already search directly — no aggregation needed to reach the whole corpus |
| How to judge trustworthiness | Same criteria as any repository: CoreTrustSeal certification, a re3data.org listing, and clear preservation commitments | Same criteria apply equally — CoreTrustSeal certification and a re3data.org listing are not restricted to one repository category |
Common questions
FAQ
Which one should I deposit in if my funder just says an institutional or disciplinary repository is acceptable?+
Either satisfies that wording. Use your institution's IR if there's no dominant subject repository in your field, or if your institution's research office needs to track the deposit directly. Use the subject repository if your field already treats it as the default place to read that literature — arXiv for physics/CS/math, PubMed Central for biomedical work, SSRN for economics and law.
Can I deposit the same paper in both an institutional repository and a subject repository?+
Yes, and many researchers do. Deposit locations aren't mutually exclusive — the same accepted manuscript can be self-archived in a university's IR and in a subject repository like arXiv, as long as each deposit complies with the publisher's self-archiving policy and any embargo period.
Are institutional and subject repositories the same as generalist repositories like Zenodo or Figshare?+
No. These are different organizing axes. A generalist repository is domain-agnostic and not restricted by author affiliation (Zenodo, Figshare, Dryad, and Dataverse installations are the standard examples). An institutional repository is defined by author affiliation; a subject repository is defined by field. See the CASRAI dictionary entries for generalist repository and discipline-specific repository for that separate distinction.
Does NIH or NSF care which category of repository I use for data, not just manuscripts?+
They care about the specific named repository for manuscripts — NIH requires PubMed Central and NSF requires NSF-PAR — but for underlying research data, both agencies ask for a repository appropriate to the data type and discipline, which can be an institutional repository, a subject-specific data repository, or a generalist one such as Zenodo or Dryad. Check CoreTrustSeal certification and the repository's re3data.org listing either way.
Going deeper
