Schools & Colleges Reference Access Scheme (Lanchester Library): Open Access Resources

Open Access resources are freely available sources of knowledge (mainly academic in content).

Examples include academic journal articles, books, conference reports and PhDs.

Don't worry if you find the resources difficult to understand.   The information is aimed at university level students to PhD researchers.  Sometimes it can be useful to simply read the introduction and conclusion to journal articles for example to gain knowledge about a topic.   For more information about journal articles go to the journals tab.

Click on the links on the right to look at some of the resources available.

Some public libraries provide free access to scholarly databases for public use.  

They contain a wider selection of journal articles than you would find on Google Scholar.

You need to visit the public library to use Access to Research - check if your library provides access

• Art Collections Online

  Explore art collections of the world via this central hub on Google.

• arXiv

  (pronounced "archive") A site owned by Cornell University, containing papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, systems science and economics.

• Biomed Central

  BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

• CiteSeerX

  A public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

• Cochrane Library

  Systematic Reviews and Clinical Trials, some are fully open access and others are abstracts only.

• Core.ac.uk - open research repositories

  CORE’s mission is to seek out all open access research from research repositories (universities and elsewhere) and journals worldwide and make them available to the public.

• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

  The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access, provided that these publications meet academic standards. Peer reviewed means that subject experts (normally academics and researchers) review a work for quality and accuracy before it's published.

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

  12000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

• Jurn

  JURN is a multidisciplinary index for open access articles. It's unique strength is coverage of open access arts and humanities journals, something which has been highly curated and refined over a period of many years.

• Pubmed Central

  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.

• Sabinet Open Access Journal Collection

  Sabinet’s African Journals database is a collection of southern African and African journal titles across a range of disciplines.

• Scielo

  South Africa’s premier open-access searchable full-text journal database in service of the South African research community. The database covers a selected collection of peer-reviewed South African scholarly journals