Open Access: Finding Open Access Materials

Except the sections on the Open Access Button, Finding Open Access Journals, and Finding Open Access books, content for this Ligguide page has been borrowed from the Loyola Notre Dame Library Copyright Information Center Research Guide and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Content on the Open Access Button, Finding Open Access Journals, and Finding Open Access Books has been borrowed from the Boston College Libraries' Finding OA Content Page and is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License. 

• Open Access Button Chrome extension. When you find an article behind a paywall, click the open access button. The button will return a link to an open access version, if one exists, and also to any underlying datasets. If none exists, you can request a copy. Volunteers will contact the author and ask for an open access version.

• UnPaywall's Chrome Extension. When you view a research article, Unpaywall automatically looks for a copy in our index of 20 million free, legal fulltext PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the article.

• Ulrichsweb Serial Directory. A source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types: academic and scholarly journals, e-journals, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more.

• 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 (NIH/NLM). 

• arXiv. An open-access pre-print repository of articles in the sciences.

• bioRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of biology articles.

• medRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of health sciences articles.

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  ROAD

  ​ROAD synthesizes information about open access journals from a number of sources. Its base is a subset of the ISSN registry. Users may browse to find open access journals by country or by subject. Users may also search for an open access title by name, ISSN number, subject, or other concept.

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  Directory of Open Access Journals

  The Directory of Open Access Journals provides browseable lists of journals in many subjects.

• 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.
• OpenDOAR

  OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents.
• BASE

  BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is an online search tool for open access resources and documents. Hosted at the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, BASE harvests its data from open access scholarly repositories.
• 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.
• PLoS
  Creative Commons licensed science journals.
• BioMed Central
  Creative Commons licensed medical journals.

• Directory of Open Access Books

  17253 Academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from 319 publishers

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  Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a collaborative global effort to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. OCA content is hosted by the Internet Archive.

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  HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The Hathitrust collection includes nearly 16,000,000 digitized items, and almost 6,000,000 are in the public domain, available to anyone with an internet connection.

The DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) is a large-scale digital public library in a single platform and portal, providing open and coherent access to our society’s digitized cultural heritage. 

Public domain works are not protected by copyright either because their copyright term has expired or they fall within a category of works that are not subject to copyright law. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission. More information on the public domain is available here.

Works that are in the public domain can be found almost anywhere so this is far from an exhaustive list. The following is merely a selection of sites that have large collections of content in the public domain.

• Library of Congress American Memory Project Contains a large number of historical images and documents from American history. Note: Not all works are in the public domain. Be sure to check rights statements for use.
• WWII Poster Collection A collection of over 300 posters issued by U.S. federal agencies during World War II. All posters are in the public domain.
• Project Gutenberg A collection of over 42,000 ebooks in the public domain.
• U.S. Government Photos and Images A collection of U.S. government photos and images browseable by topic. Note: Not all images are in the public domain. Make sure to check rights statements before use.
• Internet Archive A large collection of videos, images, music, and text. Note: Not all content is in the public domain. Check rights statements for collections or individual works before use.
• NASA Multimedia Repository Video and images from NASA in the public domain unless otherwise noted.
• National Archives Images and documents from the National Archives. In the public domain unless otherwise noted.
• Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers A collection of historic American newspapers from 1836-1922. All content is in the public domain.
• Early State Records Online A collection of Maryland State Records from the Maryland State Archives in the public domain including newspapers.
• Maryland Online Historical Newspapers Selected years of early Maryland newspapers.

The following sites may contain content licensed under Creative Commons. Note that not all content on the site is necessarily licensed under Creative Commons. If you are in doubt about the license on a work contact the copyright holder.

• Google Image Search Use the usage rights dropdown menu from the advanced search page to search for content licensed under Creative Commons.
• flickr Use the advanced search to limit to Creative Commons licensed content.
• Open Clip Art Library All clip art on the site is in the public domain and may be used freely.
• Pixabay >Images that have been placed in the public domain and may be used freely.
• Creativity 103 Abstract background designs licensed under Creative Commons.
• Pexels A stock photo website where all images are licensed under a CC0 license.

The following sites may contain content licensed under Creative Commons. Note that not all content on the site is necessarily licensed under Creative Commons. If you are in doubt about the license on a work contact the copyright holder.

• Jamendo Use the advanced search to limit to Creative Commons licensed materials.
• ccMixter An entire site of music licensed under Creative Commons.
• Free Loops Free downloadable music loops.
• freesound Sound effects all licensed under Creative Commons.
• OpSound Creative Commons licensed music.

The following sites may contain content licensed under Creative Commons. Note that not all content on the site is necessarily licensed under Creative Commons. If you are in doubt about the license on a work contact the copyright holder.

• YouTube After your search use the filter dropdown menu below the search box to limit to Creative Commons licensed videos.
• Vimeo
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons licensed video footage from Al Jazeera.