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Open Access: Home

Guide to finding open access sources

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access materials are freely available for viewing and/or use.

More information about Open Access.

Public Domain & Copyright laws

The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it (credit: Stanford University Library).

More information about Public Domain & Copyright Laws.

Open Access Journals

A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series.

Open Access journals from Cambridge University Press including 43 journals and 27,602 articles.

Peer reviewed and open access collection of journals including business, education and science journals.

De Gruyter publishes fully open access journals. All articles undergo double blind peer-review and fast turnaround time from submission to online publication.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Fully open access journals spanning a wide range of technologies.

Searchable gateway of open access journals for every biomedical discipline.

OpenDOAR is a global directory of Open Access repositories and their policies.

Open Access journals from Oxford University Press.

Complete holdings of selected math and statistics journals from a variety of publishers hosted by Project Euclid.

A non-profit organization dedicated to making scientific literature freely available by publishing a suite of influential Open Access journals across all areas of science and medicine.

Hundreds of free journals from Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform.

Hundreds of free peer-reviewed journals from Springer, across all areas of science.
Taylor & Francis and Routledge currently publish a number of pure open access journals. The articles in these journals receive both rigorous peer review and expedited online publication.

Wiley Open Access publishes authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across many research disciplines.All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. Wiley Open Access publishes a number of online journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.

Open Educational Resources

Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER) for Faculty

Scholarly Communication and Related Issues

Scholarly communication is the life-blood of the university’s teaching and research mission. Issues of copyright, intellectual property rights, and the long-term preservation of digital assets are posing new challenges to faculty, schools, & librarians.

Open Access search via UCI Libraries website

How to search for Open Access material on UCI Libraries web page:

Go to https://www.lib.uci.edu/search and follow these instructions:

  1. If off-campus, select ‘enter as a guest’ to access the search page
  2. In the search bar enter the keywords that describe your topic and click on press enter.
  3. On the left side of the page under the heading ‘Availability” select Open Access and press enter.
  4. An orange Open Access unlock logo will appear below each entry, symbolizing the item is publicly available.

Open Access search via HathiTrust Digital Library website

HathiTrust has open access and membership access.

All users can do the following without logging in or having a membership with HathiTrust:

  1. Search across the entire collection
  2. Read and view works that are “full-view”
  3. Search within works that are “limited (search-only)”
  4. Download a single page at a time from works that have download restrictions (e.g., works that are in the public domain but were digitized by Google or other vendors with contractual limitations)
  5. Download an entire work that doesn’t have download restrictions (e.g., works digitized by Internet Archive and other organizations, works that have been opened with a Creative Commons license)

For more information: HathiTrust login help page

 

Open Access search via Google Scholar

Google Scholar articles are generally an abstract, but some are available with open access full text.

  1.  Look for [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list for full text.
  2. If you don't see [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list, select all versions--there may be a free full text version listed.
  3. If full text is not available for your article choice via open access, look for related articles under article list to see if articles on the same topic are available full text.