Metalist of Open Access E-print Archives: the Genesis of Institutional Archives and Independent Services

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Description/Abstract

Open access eprint archives are where authors of published research papers and papers destined for peer reviewed publication can self-archive the full texts of their work for all to see. What is the scale of open access eprint archives, and of author self-archiving, currently? Despite the rhetoric there are no quantitative studies. The context for such studies is not just the growing scale of open access archives and the sheer number of archives, but the evolving structure of distributed archives and independent services. This is not a list of individual open access archives of full-text research papers, but instead lists and comments on other lists of individual archives. This list and its categorisation gives a broad overview of the structure, size and progress of full-text open access eprint archives. It is intended to assist further quantitative research on the open access eprint phenomenon for those who want to measure the growth and quality of open access eprint archives.