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Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Finding OA Content

Guide for student and faculty authors to understand scholarly publishing, open access, and retaining copyright. Several content boxes in this guide were used with permission from Boston College.

Open Access Content at Todd Wehr Memorial LIbrary

Learn more by reading a book or an e-book, or try one of these databases that specialize in open access content:

  • ArXiv: Open access to 845,870 e-prints in computer science, economics, electrical engineering and systems science, mathematics, physics, qualitative biology, qualitative finance, and statistics.
  • BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): One of the world's most voluminous search engines, especially for open access web resources.
  • CC Search: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization devoted to providing a legal licensing structure for open content. Their search engine finds open material (text, images, video) across a number of different open repositories (Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, SoundCloud, Europeana).
  • CORE: A search engine aggregating the world's open access research papers.
  • CORE Humanities Commons: A division of CORE and the Humanities Commons, this search engine focuses specifically on OA materials in the humanities disciplines.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals: Full-text scientific and scholarly journals in a variety of subjects and languages.
  • Google Scholar: Although it is not possible to limit search results to text materials licensed for re-use, Google and Google Scholar both index a large number of repositories and return open access results.
  • HathiTrust: A partnership of academic and research institutions offering millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
  • Knowledge Unlatched (KU): Offers free access to scholarly content for every reader across the world.
  • OAISter:OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources. It was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide. Today, OAIster includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors. The records for these items are included in OCLC's Worldcat, but if you want to search just for open access content, you can do that through a separate OISter interface
  • Open Access Theses and Dissertations:Open access graduate theses and dissertations from around the world. Currently includes nearly 2 million theses and dissertations from over 800 institutions.
  • PhilPapers: Index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. Includes journals, books, open access archives, and personal pages maintained by academics.
  • Public Library of Science (PLoS): PLoS is one of the oldest and most well-established open access publishers across the sciences. They are comprised of a number of different journals including PLOS Biology, PLOS One, and PLOS Pathogens.
  • PQDT Open:Full-text of open-access dissertations and theses.

Open Educational Resources and Copyright

Here are two documents designed to answer educator's questions about using copyrighted material in their own OER resources or in OA texts they're adapting:

Using Copyrighted Content within Open Education Resources: This abbreviated tool is intended to help OER champions readily navigate how and when to appropriately include Copyrighted materials in open educational resources. Written by the WTCS OER Network. 

 

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources: This lengthy code is a tool for educators, librarians, and authors to evaluate common professional scenarios in which fair use can enable them to incorporate inserts, including those protected by copyright, to create OER. Written by the CMSI Center for Media and Social Impact.

Finding OA Images

 

Finding images licensed for re-use has become easier. Here are some sites to explore: