With the increasing number of national and institutional mandates or recommendations for researchers to publish their research output open access, there is a corresponding increase in the amount of research freely available.
In this section, you will find examples of open access repositories, journal collections and research platforms. You will find other types of open resources, including databases, statistics and theses, in our Grey Literature LibGuide.
Repositories are collections of open access articles, reports, theses, data and other research output. Most academic institutions and some healthcare organisations operate a repository and provide a wealth of open research.
OpenDoar
OpenDOAR is a global directory of thousands of open access repositories. Particularly useful to find the repository for a particular institution.
RCSI Repository
An open access repository of research and scholarly output of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Included are peer-reviewed papers, reports, book, book chapters and theses.
The service is maintained and managed by RCSI Library. See our LibGuide for more information and instructions for RCSI researchers on uploading their research to the repository.
Lenus: Irish Health Repository – HSE publications, articles and grey literature
Lenus is the Irish Health Repository provided by HSE Library that includes peer reviewed journal articles, grey literature, dissertations, reports and conference presentations on Irish Healthcare.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A directory of almost 17,500 peer-reviewed, open access journals, covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Useful for checking the validity of a open access journal before submitting a paper for publications.
Access to over 8 million articles is provided.
PMC is an open access archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
Europe PMC partners with PMC and others to provide access to over 8 million full-text articles, including pre-prints, micropublications, books, reviews and protocols
Many databases such as PubMed (free to access) have filters which allow you to narrow your search results to free full text items. Look out for “open access” filters, or in the case of PubMed, “free full text” filter.
Open research platforms provided by funding agencies are a relatively new method of rapidly publishing research outputs. All versions of the paper are available in full text, and the peer review process is transparent and open also. Restricted to research funded by the particular agency.
The source data underlying the papers should also be available.
Examples:
Unpaywall is a project of Impactstory, a not for profit company that aims to make scholarly research more open, accessible and reusable. This is a free service that locates open-access articles and presents papers that have been legally archived and are freely available as open access. Unpaywall harvests content from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world.
How to install Unpaywall
Search for Unpaywall and turn it on by sliding the swipe to the right. When you browse to a paywalled paper and an open access version is avaliable Unpaywall’s grey ‘lock’ icon turns green and ‘unlocks’, clicking on the icon will then bring you to the open access version of the paper.