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Open Access & Institutional Repository: Discovery and Visibility

Discovering Open Access articles

Unpaywall, OA Button and CORE Discovery (in beta) are all Chrome and Firefox extensions that find legal open access copies of individual articles from both publishers and repositories. You can also paste an article DOI (the unique article identifier) into the OA Button and CORE Discovery search bars. Open Access Helper works the same way for iOS and Safari. Test them out with this article: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-016-0002 (the article DOI is 10.1038/s41559-016-0002)

Kopernio: a Chrome extension that finds articles from our library subscriptions and open access versions.

Google: if you find an article that is behind a paywall, try copy & pasting the article title into a search engine. If there is a copy in a repository it will often display on the first page of search results. 

Can’t find what you need?: if you can’t find a legal open access version, use the library interlibrary loan service and we will source a copy, often within 24 hours. Please do not spend your own money, or grant money, on journal articles

Articles can be made open access (OA) on the journal website (gold OA) or via institutional and subject repositories (green OA, often involving an embargo set by the journal publisher).

Both Scopus and Web of Science have a filter to select only Open Access articles. They predominantly display articles that are gold OA, not the many thousands of articles that are green OA via repositories and preprint servers.

CORE: a database that aggregates open access content from journals and repositories, useful for searching by keyword.

Dimensions: a research information database with an Open Access filter proving links to journals and preprint servers. Please note that we only have access to the free version of Dimensions.

Share: a free open data set of research outputs, useful for searching for preprints

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Making Open Access work for you

Contact Us

For help or advice with any Open Access or ePrints Soton query:

email eprints@soton.ac.uk

Increase your visibility

Posting your work to a preprint repository before peer review or submission to a journal:

  • Prevents scooping as it timestamps your work
  • Can lead to new collaborations
  • Can be cited in grant applications and progress reports rather than the work being stuck in a revise & resubmit process
  • Allows you to measure interest in the article
  • Allows appraisal from peers to determine if the work is ready for submission to a journal

See: Bourne PE, Polka JK, Vale RD, Kiley R (2017) Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission. PLoS Comput Biol 13(5): e1005473. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473

Sign up via Pure for an ORCID iD

This unique identifier eliminates name ambiguity, improves discoverability, saves you time in publisher and funder submissions and stays with you throughout your career even when you change institution.

Add your article to Pure

Upload a copy of your Accepted Manuscript (the version incorporating all changes resulting from peer review) to Pure as soon as your article is accepted by a publisher - this is all you need to do to fulfill both REF2021 and the University of Southampton Open Access policies.

  • publications on your Staff Profile page are automatically updated from Pure
  • Pure feeds ePrints Soton, our institutional repository. Your articles will display in Google searches and even if the publisher requires an embargo on the Accepted Manuscript, readers can use the Request a Copy button in ePrints Soton to ask for a copy of your article.

Sharing your research data encourages collaboration between researchers and can result in important new findings. This enhances your research profile and studies have shown a correlation between sharing research data and increased citations, for example Piwowar et al, 2007.

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