Finding open access research online | Open Access Oxford

We have collated a selection of resources to help you find and use open access publications from around the world.

Remember these tools are for individual use, and always read the terms and conditions before registering.

On this page

Finding open access short-form publications (articles, conference papers, policy documents)
Finding open access monographs/books
Browser extensions for finding open access material

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

A global index of fully open access journals and articles screened for specific criteria (a 'safe list').

Go to DOAJ

CORE (COnecting REpositories)

An aggregation of open access content from UK and worldwide repositories and open access journals. It provides a range of services including discovery, analytics, and text mining access.

Go to CORE

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

Provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free.

Go to BASE

OAIster

A union catalogue of more than 25 million records representing open access resources from open access collections worldwide

Go to OAIster

Digital Commons Network (DCN)

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.

Go to the DCN

JURN directory

The JURN Directory contains around 3,000 links to selected open access or otherwise free e-journals in the arts and humanities, nearly all of which are indexed and searchable in the JURN search engine.

Search the JURN directory

African Journals Online (AJOL)

AJOL, the world's largest and preeminent platform of African-published scholarly journals, is a Non-Profit Organisation that (since 1998) works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research

Go to AJOL

Dissemin

Dissemin detects papers behind paywalls and helps their authors to upload them in one click to an open repository.

Policy Commons

Produced by Coherent Digital. Provides almost 2.5 million full text think-tank publications, including policy reports, administrative documents, books, project and campaign documents, working papers and discussion papers, journal articles, press releases, briefs and brochures.

Search policy commons

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

The directory of academic open access books from hundreds of publishers, including the OAPEN collection.

Go to DOAB

Hathi Trust digital library

HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitised items.

Go to Hathi Trust

Project Gutenberg

A library of over 60,000 free ebooks.

Go to Project Gutenberg

Open books and chapters on ORA

A collection of open access books and book sections available within the Oxford University Research Archive, including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, trade books, and more.

View the collection on ORA

Open Access Button

Automatically detects paywalled articles and presents an open access alternative (for example a version in an institutional repository).

Get the OA button

Unpaywall

An extension which searches Unpaywall’s database of millions of free scholarly articles each time you encounter a paywall.

Get the Unpaywall extension

CORE Discovery

An in-browser extension from CORE – also recommends open access articles on a similar subject if the article is paywalled.

Get the CORE discovery extension