Open access (OA) resources are freely available sources of academic information. They provide unrestricted online access to research outputs such as journal articles and books. OA content is open to all, with no access fees, though you may be limited by your location and you may have to register before you can start using some of them.
To help you identify useful OA resources we have listed key general resources for both journals and textbooks. For subject specific resources please see the tabs for each school on the left-hand side.
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals is an online directory that indexes and provides access to over 2,800 open access, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of subjects.
CORE offers access to millions of open access research papers by aggregating all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide.
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, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly works.
Google Scholar provides a fast and simple way to search for scholarly literature which includes journal articles, pre-published papers and more. To link to Solent University's holding go into settings and set the library links to show Solent.
Jstor Open Content provides Open Access to books and journals, as well as journal content published before 1923 in the United States (and prior to 1870 elsewhere) for free.
Kopernio uses the library subscriptions to get PDFs where possible. When your subscriptions do not grant you access, Kopernio will search for an open access alternative from its vast database of Open Access articles and download it into your Kopernio library. View the presentation Kopernio Fast, one-click access to millions of research papers.
OpenDOAR is the 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.
SSRN - Social Science Research Network eLibrary provides 919,342 research papers from 467,196 researchers in more than 50 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.
ProQuest Publicly Available Content Database
Designed to complement other databases and collections, this database brings together or links to full text for publicly available scholarly content from a number of different sources from around the world. It includes content from major subject repositories such as arXiv as well as open access journals. Content includes journal articles, pre-prints, books, conference papers and reports.
To gain full access off campus you will need to enter your university email address and password.
Open access textbook are licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online, they can be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats and may be downloaded or purchased. The below are examples covering general subject areas.
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