Workshop: Finding Open Access Resources
OA scholarly materials
At the repository level
A repository is a collection of other smaller OA sites and collections. Repositories are useful for searching for other OA collections.
At the journal level
These are collections of OA journals. You can search by title and content keywords.
At the institutional level
Academic institutional repositories have off open access to scholarship often through preprints. Most institutions of higher education have an institutional scholarly repository. You can search by institution name and "OA" or "repository" They are often housed through the institution's library. Here are a few examples:
- DASH (Harvard)
- Deep Blue (U Mich)
- eScholarship (University of California System)
- WMU ScholarWorks
At the author level
Authors often retain the right to their scholarship and make them available on scholarly sites.
At the subject level
Subject repositories are open to scholars all over the world who publish work in a particular discipline. Some of the larger ones include:
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics
- arXiv: Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
- SSRN: Social Science Research Network
- PLoS Public Library of Science
- PubMed Central Biomedicine and Life Sciences
Adapted from https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/for-authors/open-access/#green
OA books
A searchable and browsable database of open access books.
- OAPEN Library
Free online access to monographs in different Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.
- Open Access Book Publishing
A video that provides an overview of OAPEN's (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) study and recommendations of open access monograph publishing.
- OA Book Business Models
A list of business models and revenue sources for open access book publishing
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
HathiTrust is a collaborative repository of over 10 million volumes, 2.5 million in the public domain and fully accessible. Digitized content from research libraries, the Google Books project and the Internet Archive initiative are included. All public domain titles not digitzed by Google and in the HathiTrust Digital Library are available for full PDF download. Works in copyright may be searched with only the page number and number of hits given.
Although WMU is not in partnership with HathiTrust at this time, all users may create a guest "friend" account to use collection builder tools. Instructions are here.
OA Theses and Dissertations
- Open Access Theses & Dissertations (OATD)
Searches for master's theses and PhD dissertations published around the world.
- Thesis Commons
Multidisciplinary repository of theses and dissertations.
OA theses and dissertations through Ebsco