Library Guides: Legal Studies: Open Access

Open Access Explained

Open Access is a global movement to make scholarly content more easily discoverable and accessible by removing subscription and login barriers and in some countries it is becoming part of national grant funding policies.

Open Access Resources

Directory of Open Access Repositories
A global directory of Open Access repositories and their policies
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages. The directory is indexed in JCU Worldcat.
OAPEN - Open Access Publishing in European Networks
"OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe."
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All books in the OAPEN Library can be found through WorldCat
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world
DART Europe
European portal for accessing electronic theses and dissertations from European academic institutions.
CORE
CORE aggregates all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public.

Find Open Access Resources

Open Access Button
You can use the web interface or internet browser plugin to search for a freely available version of a particular article.
Unpaywall
Web browser extension that you can install quickly and easily from their website. Once installed, a padlock will appear in your browser screen when you land on the page of a scholarly article with a DOI. If the work is openly accessible, the padlock will turn green - all you have to do is click and you will be redirected to the OA version of the item you are interested in.
CORE Discovery
Free browser extension that has been developed by CORE, a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University and Jisc, aimed to aggregate open access research papers from around the world.

Open Access Helper
Open Access Helper is designed to help you get easy & legal access to Open Access versions of otherwise “paywalled” scientific articles. Whenever the extensions comes across a DOI, it will query the APIs of unpaywall.org & core.ac.uk to see if an Open Access copy is available elsewhere and clearly indicate this for easy and quick access.
Open Access Helper can be downloaded on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, and it is also available for iPhone and iPad.
Open Access Helper offers:

Creative Commons

Many researchers release their previously unpublished work under a Creative Commons (CC) license, that allows you to authorize some uses of your work, while preventing others