Research Guides: Online Research: Open Access Resources

What is Open Access?

Open Access Resources are research materials have been made available to the general public, free of charge: data and datasets, books and articles, including scholarly research articles. This is not the same thing as public domain works, or those items that have fallen out of copyright protection; open access authors have chosen to share freely, so anyone can use the works legally without permission or fees.

Selected Open Access Resources

PubMed Central (PMC) This link opens in a new window
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PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Nearly 10,000 journals on multiple topics; about half are searchable at the article level.
Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)
The Metropolitan Museum’s initiative—called Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)—provides access to images of art in its collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions; these images are now available for scholarly use in any media.
Project Gutenberg
Provides free access to more than 33,000 (primarily older public domain) books which can be downloaded in a variety of formats including ePub, Kindle, HTML and plain text.
Google Books
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database.

HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window
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HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible well into the future. The HathiTrust Digital Library includes millions of digitized book titles, most of which were published before 1923.

Open Access

Public Library of Science, 2010, https://flic.kr/p/8L4egi

More Open Access Resources

Open Access Resources
A research guide from Southern Connecticut State University
OpenDOAR
A directory of open access repositories

More Information

The Case for Open Access
Position statement from the Public Library of Science (PLOS)
SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Open Access Directory (OAD)
A wiki on open access information by the OA community, hosted by Simmons College