The articles published to the journal. That’s where the peer review happens. The university will then host a copy of the published paper with open access. The university doesn’t peer review this, it just provides the hosting. Often the motivation for doing this is compliance with open access. Many areas have well regarded journals that authors want to publish in that are closed, but the research is funded on the condition of open access.
These papers hosted by the university may have different formatting, but will have the same content. They are often harder to find as the references will be to the same paper published in the journal. Some paper search engines will include links to the university’s free access page, but you often have to search separately on a general purpose search engine to find that copy.
In my time looking for published papers, I have only very rarely seen papers which are also hosted by the university of the author. I suspect in your case it was hosted because of something specific to the school or the author, rather than a general thing.
What I am seeing more often in my field is people posting a version of the paper on “arxiv”. This is a similar open-access approach, but you do have to be careful with arxiv papers as you can post anything on it, including work that never was or will be peer-reviewed.
The articles published to the journal. That’s where the peer review happens. The university will then host a copy of the published paper with open access. The university doesn’t peer review this, it just provides the hosting. Often the motivation for doing this is compliance with open access. Many areas have well regarded journals that authors want to publish in that are closed, but the research is funded on the condition of open access.
These papers hosted by the university may have different formatting, but will have the same content. They are often harder to find as the references will be to the same paper published in the journal. Some paper search engines will include links to the university’s free access page, but you often have to search separately on a general purpose search engine to find that copy.
In my time looking for published papers, I have only very rarely seen papers which are also hosted by the university of the author. I suspect in your case it was hosted because of something specific to the school or the author, rather than a general thing.
What I am seeing more often in my field is people posting a version of the paper on “arxiv”. This is a similar open-access approach, but you do have to be careful with arxiv papers as you can post anything on it, including work that never was or will be peer-reviewed.