LibGuides: English and Creative Writing: Resources for finding Open Access content

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What is Open Access?

An increasing number of scholarly materials (books, journals, conference papers) are being made freely available online as Open Access materials. These materials have been peer reviewed, quality checked and the full text is available online.

The following links give access to some of the key Open Access resources. The lists are by no means exhaustive but give an indication of the range of material available on open access.

Open Access resources by category

Access to research
Public libraries initiative that gives free access to over 10 million academic articles
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).
CORE
CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public. In this way CORE facilitates free unrestricted access to research for all.
Digital Public Library of America
Discover 40,708,413 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States
Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. HathiTrust provides long-term preservation and access services to digitized content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house member institution initiatives. Items in the public domain are in full-view for everyone and items held in copyright are searchable.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
Search tool which searches across 21 different sources of open educational materials.
MERLOT
Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
NYPL Digital Collections
Explore nearly 900,000 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections.
OAISTER
Catalogue of open access digital resources from collections around the world. More than 30 million records with links to full text where possible
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records.
OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR provides a comprehensive list of institutional and subject-based repositories around the world. It also lists archives set up by funding agencies in the UK and Europe.
ROAD: Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
UNESCO funded project to create a directory of Open Access publications, including journals, conferences and annuals, that have been awarded an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number). You can search for publications but not their content.
Springer (Open Access Books)
Offers researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals and books. Content is freely available online for everyone and contains a broad range of journal and book content.

BCcampus Open Ed Resources
Search for open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats. Search by subject and download them to your computer.
Provides access to openly licensed textbooks and other OER materials with a broad discipline focus including; business, education, science and mathematics. (BCcampus, Canada)
Bookboon
Bookboon.com is an online publisher of free books. They provide textbooks covering topics from Engineering and IT to Economics and Business. Students will need to sign up to download the free textbooks as a PDF or to read online.
Cambridge Core (Books)
Open access books and journals from Cambridge University Press - Open access titles.
Directory of Open Access Books
Thousands of open access books to read and download
Google Books
Provides free access to some electronic book samples and previews (i.e. NOT the full-text). The content which is free to access is subject to change.
InTechOpen
Read, share and download more than 5,000 peer-reviewed Open Access books. Subject coverage is mainly in the sciences.
Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) makes scholarly content freely available to everyone. Includes over 2000 books.
LibreTexts
LibreTexts is an Open Textbook Project initiated at the University of California. Coverage includes sciences, social science, engineering, business, humanities, and more. To find the books, go to Explore the libraries, then choose the subject you are interested in and then click on bookshelves.
Lyryx Open
Provides access to electronic textbooks for business, economics, mathematics & statistics.
MERLOT
Provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OAPEN OA Books toolkit
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences
OAPEN OA Books toolkit
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences
OASIS
OASIS searches across Open Textbook Library, Libretexts, BCcampus, Teaching Commons, GALILEO Open Learning Materials (University System of Georgia).
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
Online Books Page
Provides an index to books which are freely accessible.
Online Mathematics Textbooks
Includes resources for mathematics and STEM fields such as engineering, chemistry or computer science.
Open Book publisher
Publisher providing free access to about 40 academic books, mainly in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Open Research Library
Is planning to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books.
OpenStax
Publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are freely available online.
Open Textbook Library
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks.
It was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related content today.
Genrally the texts are taken from books published pre-1923. You will not find the latest titles, but will find old classics.
Saylor Academy
A nonprofit initiative which offers free and open online courses/resources. The site includes a repository of free and easily accessible textbooks and covers a large variety of subjects.
Springer (Open Access Books)
Offers researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals and books. Content is freely available online for everyone and contains a broad range of journal and book content.
UCL Press Open Access Books
Gives free access to peer-reviewed scholarly works and innovative research outputs, including open access books.

Finding specific articles:

Open Access Button (https://openaccessbutton.org/) uses the web interface or internet browser plugin to search for a freely available legal versions of a particular article, using its title, URL, DOI or PubMed ID.

Unpaywall (https:// unpaywall.org/) while you browse publisher webpages, this plugin will indicate whether a freely available copy of an article is available from a repository and will give you access at a click of a button.

Kopernio (https://kopernio.com/) is a chrome extension that finds legal open access copies of individual articles from our library subscriptions and open access versions.

ArXiv
A free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,732,878 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
bioRxiv
A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
Cambridge Core (Articles)
Open access articles from Cambridge University Press.
CogPrints
Free access to thousands of working papers covering Psychology, Neurosciences and Linguistics
CORE
20 million articles worldwide including pre publication version of journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and theses
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.
Europe PMC
Europe PMC is an open science platform that enables access to a worldwide collection of life science publications and preprints from trusted sources around the globe.
Europe PMC is developed by EMBL-EBI. It is a partner of PubMed Central and a repository of choice for many international science funders.
Free, transparent, and community-driven, Europe PMC is your gateway to life science research.
Google Scholar
Provides free access to some academic literature. Please note that not all content in Google Scholar is freely available. However, you can set up a FindIt@Tees link directly from a Google Scholar search.
SocArXiv
Open archive of the social sciences.
SocArXiv papers are moderated before appearing.
Springer (Open Access Articles)
Offers researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals and books. Content is freely available online for everyone and contains a broad range of journal and book content.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Social science research, including accounting, anthropology, cognition, economics, humanities, information systems, law, management, marketing, politics, sustainability etc. Now includes work in the sciences and humanities

TED Talks
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).
YouTube
Home to lots of useful videos on a variety of topics.
Some useful education Channels on You Tube include:
Teesside University
The Open University
Open Learn
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
CreativeCommons.org
Browse over 500 million images, available for reuse
Wikimedia commons
A collection of 67,780,996 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute
Flickr

DART Europe
DART Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses
EThOS
Provides a national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions, and free access to the full text of as many theses as possible.
NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations)
An international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).
NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) - by country listing
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world.
Open Dissertations (EBSCO)
Find Open Access Dissertations and Theses
PQDT Open
Find Open Access Dissertations and Theses

Datacite
Provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs. Organizations within the research community join DataCite as members to be able to assign DOIs to all their research outputs. This way, their outputs become discoverable and associated metadata is made available to the community. DataCite then develops additional services to improve the DOI management experience, making it easier for our members to connect and share their DOIs with the broader research ecosystem and to assess the use of their DOIs within that ecosystem.
Data.bl.uk
As part of its work to open its data to wider use, the British Library makes copies of some of its datasets available for research and creative purposes.
Google Data Set search
Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets.
Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.
Open Access Data Repositories
A list of repositories and databases for open data
UK Government statistics

JSTOR Open and free content
British Library
Suggesstions for Open access resources for research
JUSP (Journal Usage Statistics Portal)
JUSP gives a simple way of analysing the value and impact of electronic journals, books and databases through accurate and comparable usage statistics.
The Game of Open Access from Huddersfield University
The Game of Open Access is a board game developed by staff from Computing & Library Services (CLS) at the University of Huddersfield in 2017. The aim is to to engage researchers with the key concepts and tools required to meet Open Access mandates. Through the use of playful learning, it aims to develop an understanding of the role of Open Access through the initial idea for an article to its acceptance for publication.
SAGE Open Access