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://soton.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-016-0002 (the article DOI is 10.1038/s41559-016-0002)
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.
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). 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.
See this helpful blog post from the University of Southampton Digital Learning Team for further suggestions for finding copyright-free images.
For help or advice with any Open Access or ePrints Soton query:
email eprints@soton.ac.uk
Posting your work to a preprint repository before peer review or 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://soton.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473
Find out more: Kristina Hettne, Ron Aardening, Dirk van Gorp, Chantal Hukkelhoven, Nicole Loorbach, Jeroen Sondervan, & Astrid van Wesenbeeck. (2021). A Practical Guide to Preprints: Accelerating Scholarly Communication (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5600535
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.
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.
Effectively publicise your research
