More and more academic publications are being made available as open access documents, removing the need for subscriptions and other payment models, and making scholarly research available to anyone with an internet connection.
The unlocked padlock symbol is often used to show that content is open-access and freely available.
Google Scholar is an online, freely accessible search engine that searches for scholarly content across a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, and repositories.
Use Google Scholar to access full-text open access scholarly material.
The University of Bristol have created a number of tips to help you find Open Access materials. Click here.
Below are links to freely accessible academic resources. These collections allow you to search across many different journals and academic sources at once, saving you time.
| Resource | Description | link |
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Access to Research gives free, walk-in access to over 15 million academic articles in participating public libraries across the UK. You need to visit participating public libraries and log on to their PC network in order to access the full text of these academic articles. |
http://accesstoresearch.org.uk/ |
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The world’s largest collection of full text open access research papers. CORE allows you to easily search and access open-access research papers and journal articles from across the world | |
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The Directory of Open Access Books is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access | https://www.doabooks.org/doab |
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DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals |
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Open textbook library - Academic textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. | https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/ |