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London Metropolitan University

Resources for Research and Doctoral Students

What is Open Access?

Open Access resources are freely available sources of knowledge (mainly academic in content), which can include academic journal articles, books, conference reports and PhD theses.

The open access movement's purpose is to increase and encourage sharing of knowledge to help further research. 

Open Access Tools

Unpaywall - browser plug-in to locate OA content

Unpaywall retrieves Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and research repositories, and makes it easy to find, track, and use freely available research.

It’s a browser plugin that will indicate if an Open Access version of an academic journal article, conference paper or book chapter is available when you’ve landed on a web page which is requesting a login and you're being asked to pay to view the item.

For example, instead of looking at a journal article on the publisher's website, it could alternatively be available in a university digital research repository as the final pre-print copy that was sent for publication.

Unpaywall - plug-in tool to indicate free scholarly content

EndNote Click 

EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio) is a fantastic Google Chrome extension which can help you to locate Open Access versions of papers quickly and easily. When you come up against a paywalled journal article, Endnote automatically searches for a full text PDF elsewhere (i.e. in a university repository or similar OA database), and will pop up in the corner of your screen with "View PDF" if it finds one. 

Open Access Search Engines

CORE 

CORE (COnnecting REpositories) aims to facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems. It is the world's largest collection of Open Access research papers.

 

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.