Open-access repositories worldwide, 2005-2012: Past growth, current characteristics and future possibilities Stephen Pinfield1,2, Jennifer Salter2, Peter A. Bath2, Bill Hubbard3, Peter Millington3, Jane H.S. Anders3, Azhar Hussain3 1. Corresponding author 2. Information School, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK. Email:
[email protected] 3. Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham, Greenfield Medical Library, Nottingham, NG7 2UH, UK. Email:
[email protected] This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright © 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology) Abstract This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, December 2005 to December 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. It shows that initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe and Australasia, particularly the USA, UK, Germany and Australia. Soon after, Japan increased its repository numbers. Since 2010, other geographical areas and countries have seen repository growth, including East Asia (especially Taiwan), South America (especially Brazil) and Eastern Europe (especially Poland). During the whole period, countries such as France, Italy and Spain have maintained steady growth, whereas countries such as China and Russia have experienced relatively low levels of growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language-based. They typically use open- source OAI-compliant repository software but remain immature in terms of explicit licensing arrangements. Whilst the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, the available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape.