Multidisciplinary Repositories

Commercially available multidisciplinary repositories (as opposed to institutional repositories) provide archived, full-text, digital access to published journal articles in a variety of fields. The purpose of these initiatives is to provide affordable access to scholarly publications while also meeting the needs of publishers. They are frequently collaborative projects between universities and publishers, and their existence as not-for-profit entities helps to mitigate some of the corporate monopolization issues present in the scholarly communication environment. The most highly visible of these initiatives are JSTOR and PROJECT MUSE, both of which began their archiving efforts in the mid-1990s. These content repositories make an important contribution toward creating a sustainable publishing environment.

JSTOR
Initially conceived as a project to aid in conservation of stack space in libraries, this project helps to provide archived digital access to a wide array of journals in a wide array of disciplines

Project Muse
Focusing on the arts, humanities and social sciences, Project Muse offers access to over 300 journals from 60 different scholarly publishers

Directory of Open Access Journals
free full-text access to scholarly journals