Research Guides: Alumni: Open Access Research

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What is open access?

According to Peter Suber, open access literature is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." OA minimizes critical barriers to the sharing of ideas, such as restrictive copyrights or cost of information. As these barriers are removed, information can spread more easily, and the conversation can continue. Below are some sources that will help you find OA articles and books.

Find OA Articles

Digital Commons Network
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
OpenDOAR
Many colleges and universities maintain OA repositories with fulltext access to scholarly sources. OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
Paperity
A multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers.
PLOS
PLOS was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit Open Access publisher, innovator and advocacy organization with a mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
PubMed
This search engine, maintained by the National Institutes of Health, contains MANY free, fulltext articles. To access fulltext articles, click "free full text" on the lefthand menu of your search results.

Find OA Books

OpenStax
A listing of hundreds of open-licensed textbooks, many of which are many peer reviewed.
Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
Open Access books on JSTOR
More than 2,500 Open Access ebooks are now available at no cost to libraries or users.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg includes 50,000+ open-access books, including epub books and free kindle books.