LibGuides: Latest news: Open Access Content

General Statement

This page is for resources which are already freely available on the Internet, with no subscription required by the user or the institution.
Please remember to read any Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statements for these resources before you decide to start using them.
Don't use them if you are not comfortable with their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statements.

This page may be considered to be 'in development' during the lifetime of Corona Virus shutdown and should not be considered exhaustive.

The UHI eResources Manager welcomes contributions to this list. Please eMail the eResources Manager with any contributions you may have.
Any access queries should be directed to UniDesk as per normal practice.

Information on available Open Education Resources can be found on the LTA page

BASE (Bielefeld University Search Engine)
This is for academic open access web resources, indexing over 120 million documents.
CORE Database
Developed by the Open University and JISC Collections - (and as of February 2021) : provides access to 24,936,921 free to read full text research papers with 25,984,072 full texts hosted directly by CORE
DART-Europe E-theses portal
Contains over 31,000 open access research theses from European countries.
Directory of Open Access Books - DOAB
Over 27,000 Academic peer-reviewed books from 377 publishers. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. DOAB enables you to search the description of the books and enables you to download the books from the site of the publisher. DOAB is a discovery services that points to OA books that can be found elsewhere. All books listed in DOAB have a full OA licence, making them 'free to share'.
Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ
Indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals from over 130 countries. There are over 10,468 journals with 6340 searchable at article level providing access to over 1,900,000 full text articles. Not all articles are in English.
EThOS: Electronic Theses Online Service
The British Library's electronic theses online service. Contains details and abstracts of over 500,000 theses with facility to download or request full-text copies for individual use. It has around 160,000 PhD theses and dissertations from UK Universities either via download from the EThOS database or via links to the institution’s own repository. Search can be limited to items available for immediate download.
Internet Archive
'a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.'
JSTOR Open Access content : eBooks ; eJournals; research reports
Over 6000 Open Access eBooks; thousands of open access journal articles; over 20,000 research reports - from 113 policy institutes.
OAPEN Online Library
Open Access Publishing in European Networks: A central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books. Currently hosting more than 3000 titles.The OAPEN Library contains full text freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. You can search both the contents and the description of the books in the OAPEN Library, and you can download the book directly.
Open Book Publishers
'...a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. All our books are available to read online and download for free, with no Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for authors. We publish monographs and textbooks in all areas,...' & '..also publish bespoke Series for Universities and Research Centers'
Project Muse : Open Access eBooks
- This link opens in a new window
Over 2000 full text , freely available, eBooks 'from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies' in the arts and humanities / social sciences subject areas.
Proquest Dissertation and Theses Open
ProQuest's free open access collection of dissertation and theses. This open access collection consists of around 50,000 titles, primarily from universities in the US.
PubMed Central
Full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Contains over 5.9 million archived articles. Subject areas : Biomedical Sciences; Life Sciences. Date coverage : The majority of articles date from 2008. A digitizing intiative provides an extensive collection of back-copies from pre-2008 with some dating back to the 1950s.