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v2026.11,772 entries · CC-BY 4.0
Dictionary termTrack BProposedv2026.1

Subject repository

"Subject repository" is a synonym for domain repository: a repository organised by discipline or subject area rather than institutional affiliation. See the canonical domain repository entry for the full treatment.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board
· Last updated 23 Aug 2026
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Editorial commentary

“Subject repository” is used across the field as a synonym for domain repository, alongside the related term discipline-specific repository. All three names describe the same organising principle — a repository scoped by discipline or subject area, accepting deposits from researchers at any institution within that scope — and are used interchangeably in funder policy and in registries such as re3data and FAIRsharing. This entry is retained as a synonym; the full treatment lives on the canonical page.

Domain repository covers what distinguishes this repository type from an institutional repository (scoped by affiliation, not subject), what makes field-specific repositories distinct in practice (their own metadata schemas and quality-control checks), worked examples across fields, and how funders sometimes name a specific domain repository as the required deposit location for a dataset type. See also Institutional Repository vs Subject Repository for a fuller side-by-side comparison.

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element
xml
<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Subject repository"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository" />
Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)
json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository",
  "name": "Subject repository",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository",
  "description": "\"Subject repository\" is a synonym for domain repository: a repository organised by discipline or subject area rather than institutional affiliation. See the canonical domain repository entry for the full treatment.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/subject-repository",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "author": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
  },
  "datePublished": "2026-05-19T19:14:05",
  "dateModified": "2026-08-23T05:33:53",
  "inLanguage": "en-GB",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true
}

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