Institutional repositories
An institutional repository contains one organisation's open access research outputs. For example, Brunel University's repository is called BURA (Brunel University Research Archive). It's possible to use general search engine, such as Google and Yahoo. However, there are also several focused cross-repository search engines, which you could consider using, eg: Base Bielefeld, Intute, OAIster and OpenDOAR.
BURA
BURA (Brunel University Research Archive) aims to showcase and provide wider access to Brunel research outputs, such as journal articles, conference papers and doctoral theses. You can search BURA by keyword or browse by research area or collection, eg by individual school or special research institute. If you have your own versions of journal article type documents, we would like to include them in BURA. For further information about depositing papers on BURA, please contact the BURA Manager. We would be pleased to a list of your research publications, so that we can check their copyright for you.
Connect to BURA
Contact BURA manager
Base Bielefeld
Base Bielefeld is a multi-disciplinary academic search engine, created and developed by Bielefeld University Library. It sources high quality content from around 1,200 repositories. It enables deep seaching of full text documents.
Connect to Base Bielefeld
Intute
Intute Repository Search searches across 95 British academic repositories. The documents in these instutional repositories include: working papers, journal articles, reports, conference papers and theses. Many universities are represented, including: Brunel, Cranfield, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, KCL, Lancaster, Leicester, Leeds, MMU, Nottingham, Oxford, SOAS and Southampton.
Connect to Intute Repository Search
OAIster
OAIster, pronounced oyster, claims to “find the pearls”. The acronym OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative. OAIster provides access to millions of digital resources at around 1,100 institutions - the majority are US organisations but British universities are also represented. Its coverage is multidisciplinary but “academically orientated”. The search engine enables you to limit by resource type (text, image, audio, video and dataset) and to sort the results. New digital resources are harvested weekly from some institutional repositories, and monthly from others. OAIster is based a partnership between the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was started with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Connect to OAIster
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) is a global directory of open access academic repositories. It covers over 1,100 repositories, all of which have been checked for quality assurance. You can use OpenDOAR to find repositories that match particular criteria, eg subject, content type and country. You can also use OpenDOAR to search repository contents, list repositories by geographic area, and check repository usage statisitics. OpenDOAR is hosted at the University of Nottingham, with SHERPA partnership. It is funded by: the Open Societies Institute, JISC, CURL and SPARCEurope.
Connect to OpenDOAR
