[[File:Roar1aug2011.png|thumb|ROAR Growth growth map of repositories and contents, 1 Aug 2011]]
'''ROAR''' is a searchable international '''Registry of Open Access Repositories''' indexing the creation, location and growth of [[open access (publishing)|open access]] [[institutional repository|institutional repositories]] and their contents. ROAR was created by [[EPrints]] at [[University of Southampton]] in 2003. To date, over 1500 institutional and cross-institutional repositories have been registered in [[ROAR Registry of Open Access Repositories|ROAR]].<ref>Brody, T, Carr, L, Hey, JMN, Brown, A, Hitchcock, S (2007) PRONOM-ROAR: [http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/viewFile/53/25 Adding Format Profiles to a Repository Registry to Inform Preservation Services]. ''The International Journal of Digital Curation'' 2(2)</ref><ref>McDowell, CS (2007) [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september07/mcdowell/09mcdowell.html Evaluating Institutional Repository Deployment in American Academe Since Early 2005]: Repositories by the Numbers D-Lib 13 (9/10)</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Xia |first=J. |year=2011 |title=An anthropological emic-etic perspective on open access practices |journal=Journal of Documentation |volume=67 |issue=1 |pages=75–94 |doi=10.1108/00220411111105461 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Krishnamurthy |first=M. |last2=Kemparaju |first2=T. D. |year=2011 |title=Institutional repositories in Indian universities and research institutes |journal=Program: electronic library & information systems |volume=45 |issue=2 |pages=185–198 |doi= }}</ref>
ROAR's companion database, the [[ROARMAP|Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies]] (ROARMAP), is a searchable international registry charting the growth of [[Open open-access mandate]]s adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders that require their researchers to provide [[open access (publishing)|open access]] to their [[peer review|peer-reviewed]] research article output by depositing it in an [[open access (publishing)|open access]] [[institutional repositories|repository]].
