Finding Free Literary Resources: Directories to Open Access Scholarship
This guide is intended to acquaint you with how to access literary resources free of charge.
What is Open Access?
According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC),"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles." Listed below are sources of Open Access articles, books, journals, and repositories that are freely available to anyone, provided they are not used for commercial purposes:
Directories to Open Access Articles and Journals
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DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)Provides access to high quality, open access peer-reviewed (scholarly) journals. All retrieved content is freely downloadable. Search for a journal or article below.
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UnpaywallAvailable as an extension for Chrome and Firefox, Unpaywall searches its database of almost 18 million Open Access research articles. If the article you find is available for free download, a green icon with an open lock will appear. Click on that icon and the full text of the article will open.
Directories to Open Access Books
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DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)A finding tool for locating academic, peer-reviewed Open Access books. These books can be freely downloaded.
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Google BooksGoogle Books can be used to locate a wide variety of books. You can get the full text of some books for free. See tips below for navigating Google Books:
- For some books, you can only get a "preview" and will not be able to read the full version online.
- In any case, you can use Google Books to identify books you may want to try to locate at Hofstra, through Interlibrary Loan, or your public library.
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The Internet Archive has a collection of freely available, downloadable Google Books.
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Publishers of OA BooksA wiki list of publishers of Open Access books, along with brief descriptions of the specialty of each publisher.
Directories to Open Access Repositories
Repositories are digital collections of data, research and other intellectual products of university communities or other institutions. The content of repositories is sometimes, but not always, Open Access.
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CORE (COnnecting REpositories)Contains one of the largest collection of open access research papers and includes links to the original repository.
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OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)A directory of academic, quality-controlled Open Access repositories.