Editorial commentary
“Subject repository” is used across the field as a synonym for domain repository, alongside the related term discipline-specific repository. All three names describe the same organising principle — a repository scoped by discipline or subject area, accepting deposits from researchers at any institution within that scope — and are used interchangeably in funder policy and in registries such as re3data and FAIRsharing. This entry is retained as a synonym; the full treatment lives on the canonical page.
Domain repository covers what distinguishes this repository type from an institutional repository (scoped by affiliation, not subject), what makes field-specific repositories distinct in practice (their own metadata schemas and quality-control checks), worked examples across fields, and how funders sometimes name a specific domain repository as the required deposit location for a dataset type. See also Institutional Repository vs Subject Repository for a fuller side-by-side comparison.
Also known as
Disciplinary repository · Thematic repository
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Subject repository"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository" />{
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"name": "Subject repository",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository",
"description": "\"Subject repository\" is a synonym for domain repository: a repository organised by discipline or subject area rather than institutional affiliation. See the canonical domain repository entry for the full treatment.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository",
"alternateName": [
"Disciplinary repository",
"Thematic repository"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
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},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:14:05",
"dateModified": "2026-09-06T18:03:43",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
