Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A university's institutional repository holding theses, working papers, and datasets produced by its own researchers across every discipline.
- Is an instance
A discipline-specific subject repository, for example one dedicated to genomic sequence data, accepting deposits from researchers at any institution worldwide.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A general-purpose cloud storage or file-sharing service with no curation, persistent identifiers, or preservation commitment is not a repository in this sense, even if it stores research files.
Editorial commentary
A repository is an online system for storing, managing, preserving, and providing access to digital research outputs, such as articles, datasets, code, and theses, over time. A repository is more than simple file storage: it applies curation, meaning consistent metadata, organisation, and quality control, so that deposited material remains discoverable, authentic, and usable well beyond the point of deposit, and it typically exposes that metadata for harvesting by external services (see open archive).
Repositories are commonly distinguished by scope. An institutional repository collects outputs by institutional affiliation, spanning any discipline produced at that institution. A subject repository, also called a domain or discipline-specific repository, collects outputs by field regardless of institutional origin. A generalist repository accepts any content type or discipline, bound by neither institution nor field. These are organizing axes, not mutually exclusive categories: a single dataset might be deposited in both an institutional repository and a subject repository. See Institutional Repository vs Subject Repository for a direct comparison, and What Is an Institutional Repository? for more detail on the institutional case specifically.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Repository"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/repository" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/repository",
"name": "Repository",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/repository",
"description": "Repositories preserve, manage, and provide access to many types of digital materials in a variety of formats.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/repository",
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:13:36",
"dateModified": "2026-09-05T17:30:25",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
