The phrase ‘Open Library’ describes our vision for Libraries & Collections at KCL. Developing genuinely open and inclusive collections is an important part of this.
Using and promoting Open Access resources can enhance the inclusivity of our teaching and learning at King’s by surfacing the significant collections of research and primary materials from the Global Majority, bringing diverse and often unheard perspectives in to the classroom, and ensuring our students can access these resources at no financial cost throughout their student journey and beyond.
While a great deal of academic research is hidden behind paywalls, undoing this and sharing publications openly is becoming increasingly important to aid and advance scholarly communication around the world. Google Scholar is a useful search engine for finding material which has been published openly, but there are a range of other tools you can use to find this type of research. There are also a range of discipline-specific repositories, which are covered in the individual subject guides.
Databases are a great place to start when searching for open access content. The list below highlights some of the most useful databases when looking for open access resources including articles, primary sources, and books.
CORE is a not-for profit organization that aggregates open access research papers from around the world. It uses unique APIs to allow access to content and data, which is useful for text mining. You can currently search over 100 million papers.
DOAJ is a global community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Offers a growing collection of Open Access journals covering topical areas in sustainability and security studies, and offers broad coverage in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources including audio files, images, movies, datasets, and techinical reports. Today, OAIster includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors.
Here you can find subject-specific information on open access. Experts from various disciplines have compiled information, for example on disciplinary repositories, relevant open access journals, and the spread and acceptance of open access in the respective subject.
JSTOR’s continuously expanding Open Community Collections feature Open Access primary source materials (including images) in a wide variety of subjects contributed by libraries, museums, and archives.
OpenDOAR is a quality-assured, 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. A great way to search for Author Accepted Manuscripts when the published version is behind a paywall.
Many traditional commercial publishers also publish Open Access content. In fact, KCL has a number of agreements in place with academic publishers to publish King's research Open Access. Use the links below to see the open access resources provided by different publishers.
CUP is the first university press in world and is widely respected as a global leader in publishing in subjects as diverse as astronomy, Shakespeare studies, economics, mathematics and politics.
Relates particularly to: life, physical, medical, technical, and social sciences.
Content areas include: business, management, economics, engineering, computing, technology and social science.
Home of all Manchester University Press's Open Access content, including over 200 books and 3 journals. Subjects include social sciences and humanities.
Includes both green and gold open access publishing. Covers a broad range of subject areas.
Coverage is particularly strong in the following areas: Sociology, Politics, Psychology, Health, Education, Business & Management, Linguistics.
Publish nearly 600 fully open access journals in all disciplines – from the life sciences to the humanities.
Publishes high quality, peer-reviewed open access research across all disciplines.
There are also a number of well-established fully Open Access publishers that produce peer-reviewed original research articles.
African Minds is an open access, not-for-profit, publisher of scholarly books. African Minds publishes predominantly in the social sciences and its authors are typically African academics or those with a close affinity with the continent
Frontiers was founded in 2007 by two neuroscientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Frontiers spans hundreds of academic disciplines including science, health, social sciences, and sustainability.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher established in 2003 focused mainly on the sciences.
MDPI started in 1996 and publishes 427 peer reviewed journals (including 9 conference journals) in disciplines ranging from Biology and Life Sciences to Business and Economics.
Established as the UK’s first fully open access university press in 2015, UCL Press has fast become one of the leading open access scholarly publishers in the UK, publishing both traditional peer-reviewed scholarly works and innovative research outputs.
More and more academic books are being publishing open access. As new open access book publishers get established and funding requirements include monographs, we can expect this trend to increase. There are several websites that have been set up to aggregate open access books making them more discoverable. The advantage to including open access books on reading lists is that users won't need to register or log in to access them. Moreover, there are no DRM restrictions or limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing.
More than 6,000 Open Access ebooks from 75+ publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press.
OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books. Search directly, or browse by subject, publisher, language, or collection.
Created by Knowledge Unlatched with input from major academic publishers, Open Research Library provides a gateway to free open access books online. Their goal is include all open access books. Browse by genre or search directly.
Offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. Covers humanities, arts, and social sciences.
Many PrePrint Repositories offer freely accessible and long term access to content that may otherwise be locked behind the paywalls of scholarly publications.
This is the pan-African Open Access portal. The repository covers several disciplines and highlights the voices of indigenous knowledge.
arXiv is housed at Cornell University and is an open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed.
The preprint server for biologists.
A preprint is a manuscript before peer review. This directory provides a list of preprint repositories that are available to the research community. It helps researchers find the most appropriate platform for their research, enabling them to browse through existing repositories by discipline, location, language, functionalities, and other facets.
The Open Science Framework is a free, open platform where you can find papers, data, and materials.
The Scientific Electronic Library online showcases research from 16 countries in Latin America. Papers are published in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
This is the preprint server for articles in the social sciences.
It is sometimes difficult to find an open access version of a paper. The below tools have been created to help locate open access versions of resources. The plug-ins can be added to your internet browser. If you hit a paywall while searching for material, the plug-in will alert you to an open access version available. Please note these browser pug-ins are freely available tools that are not supported by the KCL.
Harvesting open access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, this plug-in directs you to open access versions of paywalled content. Click on the link to add the extension to Chrome.
You can search for an article via the website of extension. The site will search for a legal open access version or contact the author and request a copy on your behalf.
As well as directing to open access content, Lazy Scholar offers other functions such as related paper recommendations and saving your search history.