Swiss Open Access Repository

SONAR is an archive of scholarly publications. It intends to collect, promote and preserve the publications of authors affiliated with Swiss public research institutions.

The project

The services

It acts as an aggregator, bringing together the content and metadata of existing platforms and servers, including the institutional repositories (IR) of Swiss Higher Education Institutions, as well as international subject repositories. It also operates as a content disseminator: both to Swiss IRs and to the Web at large, namely to search engines of scholarly literature such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic.

Besides the automated harvesting service, interested Swiss Higher Education Institutions can subscribe to an outsourced institutional repository service, allowing their authors to directly deposit publications in SONAR.

SONAR contributes to the Swiss national Open Access strategy and its action plan, lead by swissuniversities.

Recent blog posts


  1. Institutional Repository as a Service, by RERO: variants and scope
  2. On the color schemes of Open Access
  3. On the problems of APC cost analysis
  4. Choosing a document typology is always a conundrum
  5. On Open Access Analytics in Europe

Stay informed

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