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 Repositories

3.36. Repositories are now a familiar way to facilitate open access. There are now over two thousand repositories worldwide, the great majority of them based in universities and other research institutions. They vary hugely in size and scope. Some have fewer than a hundred items, while the CERN repository in Geneva has more than a million; and the kinds of records they contain include reports and working papers, conference papers and posters, dissertations and theses, designs, exhibition materials, performances and so on. They vary also in the amount of material that is available in full text, as distinct from simply metadata records. In many of the larger institutional repositories, the majority of items are recorded only as metadata.

3.37. Some of the largest repositories are not institutionally-based, but operate as a service to specific subject communities across the globe. Among the most notable of these are ArXiv, for e-prints mainly in physics, and PubMedCentral (PMC), which is run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). The nature and scale of repositories such as these will be considered further in Section 7.

Open access journals

3.38. The number of open access journals has risen rapidly since they first began to emerge in the 1990s. There are currently over 7,600 open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), published in 117 countries. The three countries with the most journals are the US (1360), Brazil (690) and the UK (533). There have been some criticisms of the DOAJ statistics, but it is clear that open access journals now represent a significant proportion of the journals published globally. They are highly heterogeneous nature and scope, and like all journals they vary considerably in editorial standards and in the quality of peer review. Most are relatively new journals which have been open access from the start, many of them founded by individual scholars on tailor-made platforms, often with a business model based on voluntary labour and the use of a university’s web server free of charge; others are older-established journals that have converted to open access; while new open access publishers such as BioMedCentral and PLoS have established a large-scale presence in the market, with their operations funded by charging APCs to authors.

3.39. In addition to the fully open access journals, nearly all the large scholarly publishers now offer the hybrid option for at least some of their journals: that is, in return for the payment of an APC, they will make an article in an otherwise