LibGuides@Southampton: Open Access & Institutional Repository: Finding open access resources

Discovering Open Access resources

How can you get started finding Open Access articles?

Download a browser extension to search

Unpaywall, OA Button and CORE Discovery are Chrome and Firefox extensions that find legal open access copies of individual articles from both publishers and repositories. They search open access content from thousands of publishers and repositiories making it easy to find and use.

Got an article you want to check?
You can 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)

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.

Articles can be made open access (OA) on the journal website (Publisher OA) or via institutional and subject repositories (green OA, often involving an embargo set by the journal publisher). Find out more about how to make your own work open access at http://library.soton.ac.uk/openaccess/options

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.

ePrints Soton This link opens in a new window
ePrints Soton is the University's Institutional Research Repository, providing full text access to many of the University's research outputs.
CORE This link opens in a new window
CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access full text research papers - aggregating and enriching open access research papers from around the world. CORE will supply data for the UK REF 2021 Open Access Policy Audit to Research England.
Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
The DOAJ aims to cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that publish research and review papers in full text. They also use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be THE one stop shop for users of open access journals. Open access journals contained in this collection are journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.
Browzine This link opens in a new window
BrowZine is a publisher-neutral reading and discovery platform offering browsing tools to find open access journals in specific subject areas.

If you are a member of the University

Can’t find what you need? if you can’t find a legal open access version, use our 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. Find out more at https://library.soton.ac.uk/ill.

LibKey Nomad: part of our BrowZine subscription, LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that integrates with Wikipedia, publisher websites and PubMed to give you easy access to the full text of journal articles. If we do not have a subscription, LibKey Nomad uses data from Unpaywall to search for legal open access copies.

EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio): a Chrome extension that finds articles from our library subscriptions and open access versions.

Directory of Open Access Books This link opens in a new window
A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from many publishers. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
OAPEN This link opens in a new window
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.

ePrints Soton This link opens in a new window
Find University of Southampton PhD theses by using Advanced Search and checking Item Type: Thesis.
EThOS: e-theses online service This link opens in a new window
CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE DUE TO BRITISH LIBRARY CYBER ATTACK
The UK’s national thesis service provided by the British Library. You can search for theses submitted to UK institutions. Note that abstracts are not included for all theses. Full text is available if the thesis has been digitised.
Proquest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window
The world's most comprehensive collection of full-text dissertations and theses.
WorldCat This link opens in a new window
WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services including theses and dissertations from over 70,000 library catalogues worldwide. It lets you search the collections of libraries in your community and thousands more around the world. You may also find article citations with links to their full text; authoritative research materials, such as documents and photos of local or historic significance; and digital versions of rare items that aren't available to the public.

To search for theses or dissertations, go to the Advanced Search and select 'Thesis/dissertations' under 'Content'. Find only full text theses by checking the Open Access box
No password required.

To search for theses or dissertations, go to the Advanced Search and select 'Thesis/dissertations' under 'Content'.

Openverse This link opens in a new window
Search across multiple sources for material labelled for reuse under a Creative Commons licence. Previously named CC Search.
Google Images This link opens in a new window
Click 'Tools' then 'Usage Rights' to filter images by reuse, reuse with modification, noncommercial reuse, and noncommercial reuse with modification.
Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) This link opens in a new window
100,000 images of objects and materials held in art & design collections across the UK. These images are freely available and copyright cleared for use in teaching and research.
Unsplash This link opens in a new window
Beautiful, free images gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers. To learn more about how the images can be used, please go to https://unsplash.com/license
For free images: enter your search term, then click on the license drop-down and change it to Free.
Wellcome Images This link opens in a new window
Find thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects.
Wikimedia Commons This link opens in a new window
A media repository with images, sound and video clips under a number of open licences.

See this helpful blog post from the University of Southampton Digital Learning Team for further suggestions for finding copyright-free images.

Internet Archive This link opens in a new window
The Internet Archive is building a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts.. This includes 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts), 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs), 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.
Internet Archive Scholar This link opens in a new window
Internet Archive Scholar contains over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

Open Access & Institutional Repository: Finding open access resources

Discovering Open Access resources

How can you get started finding Open Access articles?

If you are a member of the University

Contact Us