ACAP Learning Resources: How to Find eResources: Open Access Resources

Introduction

Open access (OA) resources have been made freely available online without restrictions on use, reuse or distribution (Open Access Australasia). According to the Open Knowledge Foundation, "Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness."

In addition to the resources below, many commercial databases and journals provide access to open access resources alongside their commercial resources.

We also provide a curated list in our library collections.

Open Access Resources

There are many search engines and search tools available to help you locate open access resources. Some open access resources can also be found in the library catalogue. Many databases and repositories which host these resources have useful search functions, if you are not satisfied with your results using a broad search tool.

Not sure where to start? Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar provide a broad snapshot of the field. If you are a visual person, you may like the Digital Commons Network.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar allows you to search for resources that are both open access and paywalled. If a search result has a link on the right hand side, e.g. [PDF] researchgate.net, it is likely to be an open access version of that article. Some results will also have a button to click that will show you multiple versions of the document, one of which might be freely available.
Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, which has been active since 2015. Both open access and paywalled articles can be found. Direct access to free PDFs is provided when available.
Digital Commons Network
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. You can use the search bar or browse using the visual "doughnut" representing various disciplines.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
OpenAlex
OpenAlex indexes over 250M scholarly works from 250k sources, with extra coverage of humanities, non-English languages, and the Global South.
OpenAIRE
A comprehensive and open dataset of research information covering 202M publications, 82M research data, 756K research software items, from 153K data sources, linked to 4M grants and 448K organizations.
CORE Discovery
The world’s largest collection of open access research papers.
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. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
SSRN provides 1,681,350 preprints and research papers from 2,352,297 researchers in over 65 disciplines.
OAPEN
A central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books. These are often pushed out to search engines, directories and indexes.
PsyArXiv preprints
A free preprint service for the psychological sciences. Maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.
Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR)
The full-text server SSOAR, which is maintained at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, collects and archives literature of relevance to the social sciences and makes it available in open access on the Internet in accordance with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
MDPI
A pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing, MDPI has supported academic communities since 1996. Based in Basel, Switzerland, MDPI has the mission to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. Articles are indexed and may appear in search tools such as Google Scholar.
Project Gutenberg Australia
A collection of free, downloadable books that are in the public domain in Australia. (Public domain = copyright has expired.)

Directories provide the means to browse various open access resources. This includes institutional repositories, which may hold preprints or accepted manuscript versions of journal articles, along with dissertations and theses.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, and is committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
Open Access Australasia
Open Access Australasia curates directories of various open initiatives in Australasia. Their directories include open access book publishers, journals, and institutional repositories.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories.

Open data "is available to anyone, and can be accessed, analysed and reused with minimal restrictions, in an open format that is easy to modify" (State Library of Victoria). Many governments and research institutions make their data publicly available online. Some examples are linked below.

Australian Bureau of Statistics
Australia’s national statistical agency and an official source of independent, reliable information.
Data Commons
Data Commons brings together the world's public data, making it simple to explore. An initiative by Google.
Data.gov.au
Data.gov.au is the central source of Australian open government data. Anyone can access the public data published by federal, state and local government agencies.
Research Data Australia
Find, access, and re-use data for research - from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions.
World Bank Open Data
Free and open access to global development data.

You may encounter the following terms when looking for open access resources:

Accepted version/author accepted manuscript: The final draft that has been approved by a publisher. It has already undergone peer review and editing, but has yet to be formatted, copyedited or typeset for publication. Publishers often allow authors to publish these versions, but there may be an embargo period before they are permitted to do so (James Cook University).
Preprint: Traditionally, an early version of an article published online prior to being published in a journal. Usually not peer-reviewed. However, some preprints these days may undergo peer review or may be the same as a later published version, if published in a journal at all (Open Access Oxford).
Version of record: Usually, the final published version, after all edits, formatting and typesetting have been completed. This is often the publisher's final PDF, and in resources that are not open access, may have copyright restrictions (University of Melbourne Library; Confederation of Open Access Repositories).

You may also encounter different types of open access:

"Green" open access: This typically means the author has self-archived a version of their published paper. For example, in a research repository or author website. The version of record is usually still behind a paywall.
"Gold" open access: The resource is published specifically as an open resource. Typically, the author or their institution will pay the publisher an article processing charge.
"Diamond" open access: The resource is published specifically as an open resource and there is no article processing charge. These publications are often community-driven and non-commercial (UNESCO).
Hybrid journals: Subscription journals which offer authors an option to make their articles open access, usually by paying an article processing charge (Open Access Network Glossary).

For more information, you may like to read the Open Access Network Glossary or the Open Access Oxford Glossary. You may encounter disagreements on what terms mean, e.g. whether an open access article in a hybrid journal is considered "gold" open access or not.

Want to know more about running an open access journal? Check out the OA Journals Toolkit.