Skip to Main Content

Open Access

A guide to learn about open access scholarship and the Open Access movement.

Finding Open Access Materials

There are many repositories and journals in which to find open access scholarly content. The resources below are not comprehensive, but represent major directories and portals by which you can discover open access content, and repositories containing open access content. To learn about Open Access resources in your particular field, please contact your subject specialist.

OAIster

A catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. This catalog was built through harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors. 

Directory of Open Access Journals

Collects information about scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee content. It aims to be comprehensive.

Directory of Open Access Books

Collects information about peer-reviewed open access books.

OpenDOAR

A directory of academic open access repositories, allowing search by institution name, country, etc.

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)

A directory of open access repositories around the world. You can find individual repositories, and search the contents of most of the repositories in the directory.

CORE Search Portal

A search interface by which you can search the contents of hundreds of open access repositories around the world.

Open Research Library

A search interface for open access books published around the world, which aims to be comprehensive. The interface is provided by Knowledge Unlatched, which "provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.” 

OAPEN Library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks)

A service that hosts and disseminates peer-reviewed open access books, in partnership with publishers.

Unpaywall

A browser extension for Google Chrome (requires download) that checks for legal Open Access versions of articles as the user browses paywalled publisher interfaces, and links to Open Access versions if available. The extension draws from open access repositories all over the world.

Open Access Button

A search interface and a browser extension for Google Chrome (requires download). The search interface allows the user to input an article identifier (including DOIs, PMIDs, PMC IDs, citations, and more), and returns an Open Access version if available. The browser extension checks for legal Open Access versions of articles as the user browses paywalled publisher interfaces, and links to Open Access versions if available. Includes feature to request an article from the author, if no Open Access version is available.

Adapted from Temple University Libraries' Open Access guide, by Annie Johnson

Open Access Initiatives

 

MediaCommons

A media studies scholars, students, and practitioners community network newly relaunched in 2018, promoting exploration of new forms of publishing within the field, in collaboration with NYU DLTS. Currently, they are running multiple projects including: In Media Res, a forum for analysis and discussion of media text excerpts on a weekly theme; The Field Guide, which brings scholars into dialog around professional, practical issues; and [in]Transition, a collaboration with Cinema Journal that explores the potentials of videographic criticism for film and video studies. Past projects include The New Everyday, MediaCommons Press, etc., and are now available as archives on their website.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU)

Knowledge Unlatched offers free access to scholarly content. “Our online platform provides libraries worldwide with a central place to support Open Access models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.” 

Center for Open Science (COS)

Center for Open Science provides tools, training, support and advocacy for research incentives. Collaborating with NYU Data Services, they launched Open Science Framework (OSF) at NYU, a research platform that provides free and open source project management support for researchers across the entire research lifecycle. See also: OSF Guide.