Not all research is hidden behind paywalls and subscription models. The following resources give you access to freely-available scholarly papers across multiple disciplines:
Staffordshire University Online Research Repository (STORE) (https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk)
Search for Open Access research papers deposited by Staffordshire University academics and researchers.
Click here to view the latest usage statistics for the repository.
arXiv
Over 2 million research papers and documents are available to search here for Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
BASE
Over 345 million documents are available to search here from over 11,000 providers.
CORE
Provides access to 275 million research papers and articles from around the world.
DOAB
The Directory of Open Access Books is a collection of Open Access books from a range of subjects and publishers. It is a good place to search if you are looking for more in-depth Open Access materials and is a useful companion to a DOAJ or CORE search.
DOAJ
The Directory of Open Access Journals provides access to over 20,000 Open Access journals with over 9.5 million articles and is growing all the time.
EThOS
The Electronic Theses Online project run by the British Library collects electronic theses from UK university and makes them available through Ethos. You can search Ethos to find results from a large collection of PhD theses.
In addition to the information from the British Library we have created some guidance on alternatives ways to access doctoral theses while access to to EThOS is disrupted.
EndNote Click
An extension for your internet browser that quickly tells you if you have access to a version of a journal article that you are looking at. It detects when you are looking at an article’s page and if you have access, either through your library’s subscriptions or through an Open Access version, it will provide a link to the document. This extension will work in Google Chrome.
OpenDOAR
Browse a list of global institutional repositories or search for content from those repositories.
OpenGrey
Provides references to European research reports, conference papers and other "grey literature" and ways in which to access the material. Some full-text availability.
Unpaywall
Another useful browser extension. It adds an icon to the right-hand side of any page where it detects an academic article. The icon indicates whether there is an Open Access version available and clicking it will take you to the appropriate document. The extension will work in Google Chrome and Firefox.
