Its central focus is digital repositories, including digital libraries and institutional repositories, tools used to enable open access to scientific information, a movement instigated by scientific communities in universities and institutes to disseminate the results of research. It addresses the importance of production and communication in science shared in books and scientific journals. It reveals the history of digital libraries and institutional repositories, concepts, objectives and functions that have made it possible for systems to be interoperable, enabling information to be shared between scientific communities and society in general through open access. It identifies the elements of success in repositories by means of a Systematic Literature Review divided into seven distinct phases, resulting in three articles being analysed. The challenges, actions and opportunities for practice of each element detected in the articles analysed were then identified. The result of the analyses pointed to a set of actions that should be observed by digital repository developers, including design, implementation and management.