LibGuides: Open Access : Finding OA Materials

Search Engines

Google Scholar

This is the most common way of locating open access materials. There will often be two links, one to the freely-available PDF version in an open access repository and the other to the published version, access to which will be dependent on a subscription.

The following are specific open access search engines:

CORE

Gives you access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from over 600 Open Access repositories.

Base Bielefeld

Access to millions of scholarly articles and other materials (e.g. theses) from more than 3,000 sources.

Dissem

In the words of Dissem: "Dissemin detects papers behind paywalls and helps their authors to upload them in one click to an open repository."

Open Access Button

A tool that helps you find open access publications. When an article isn’t freely available the OAB asks the authors to share it by putting it into a repository.

Directories

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals

An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books

A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from many publishers.

OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories

Provides access to academic open access repositories from around the world.

ROAR: Registry of Open Access Repositories

Promotes the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world.

Irish Repositories

Research @THEA (Institutes of Technology)

Research Repository UCD

RIAN - Ireland's National Research Portal

PrePrint Archives

ArXiv

Open access to over 900,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics

SocArXiv

SocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.

bioRxiv

bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution.

OSF Preprints

The OSF is a free, open source service of the Center for Open Science, and provides a platform for many disciplinary preprint services including AgriXiv, PsyArXiv and SportRxiv.