Not all research is hidden behind paywalls and subscription models. The following resources give you access to freely-available scholarly research across multiple disciplines:
University of Staffordshire Library Search allows you to discover more open access research, along with the extensive range of print and electronic resources offered via the University of Staffordshire Library catalogue.
University of Staffordshire Online Repository (STORE) provides access to a collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly works deposited by University of Staffordshire academics alongside doctoral thesis submitted by postgraduate researchers.
arXiv has over 2.4 million research papers and documents that are available to search covering subjects including Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
BASE is one of the world's leading search engines especially for academic web resources. Over 414 million documents are available to search here from over 11,500 providers.
CORE offers access to over 317 million open access research papers by aggregating all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) houses a collection of over 88.500 Open Access books from a range of subjects and publishers
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory that indexes and provides access to over 20,000 open access, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of subjects.
Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide, curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions.
Google Scholar provides a fast and simple way to search for scholarly literature which includes journal articles, pre-published papers and more.
Jstor Open Content provides Open Access to books and journals from top scholarly publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press, as well as public domain journal content published before 1923 in the United States (and prior to 1870 elsewhere).
Oapen Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences
OpenDOAR is a global Directory of Open Access Repositories. You can search and browse through thousands of registered repositories based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
ROAD: Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources is a UNESCO funded project to create a directory of Open Access publications, including journals, conferences and annuals, that have been awarded an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number). You can search for publications but not their content.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) provides 1,480,752 research papers from 1,916,372 researchers in more than 65 disciplines.
Unpaywall is a plug-in for Chrome and Firefox that identifies and locates open-access articles and presents paywalled papers that have been legally archived and are freely available on other websites to users who might otherwise have hit a paywalled version.