Find openly available research


What services make it easier to find openly available research articles?

NORAThe Norwegian aggregator, NORA, harvests approximately 70 Norwegian institutional repositories and the content these repositories have made accessible. The records can be viewed through the search interface. NORA is part of the larger OpenAIRE network of knowledge archives and aggregators.

DOAJ. An essential search service for OA journals is the DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals. Here, you can search several thousand journals spanning various subject areas.

CORE. The aggregator claims to possess the world's largest collection of scientific articles.

1findr free edition. This is a commercial service where you can search for articles in peer-reviewed journals. It also has a free version. Advanced search is not included, but the service has a filter that will sort search results by whether they are openly available.

BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. An academic search engine that contains about 120 million documents. Around 60% of the indexed documents are openly accessible.

Dimensions. This is a citation and full-text database with scientific publications and funding information. The service is commercial, but it has a free version where you can search for open articles. Citation figures and statistics are also available.

Google Scholar is the most comprehensive database of research literature, but it does not have an editorial assessment of the sources' quality. Therefore, the database includes different types of "green" OA material (preprint, postprint, and published versions) and "gray literature", i.e., research literature that is not peer-reviewed, such as conference papers or research reports.

OpenDOAR. This is an international database of open archives and their sharing policy.

OSF Preprints. Preprints. An open platform that collects preprint versions and openly distributed manuscripts of scientific articles in everything from economics, architecture, social sciences, and medicine.

Zenodo. An open scientific archive run by CERN. Here, researchers can deposit publications, preprint versions, software, and research data for free.

 

Open subject-specific archives - for example:

Medicine, Biology

bioRxiv. An open archive of preprint versions of articles from medical research.

PubMed Central (PMC). An archive with open articles in disciplines such as medicine and biology.

Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science

arXiv. A preprint archive for physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Social Sciences and Humanities

SocArXiv. An open archive for preprint articles in social sciences, articles in progress, and other social sciences such as law, education, etc.

Humanities Commons. An archive of open articles, books, and other publications in the humanities.

Norwegian open journals in the humanities and social sciences (Norwegian text). From 2017, a selection of significant Norwegian journals in the humanities and social sciences are openly available. This has been extended with 28 open journals from 2021. There isn't a central database for these journals, so they must be looked up individually.

 

Reference databases

Researchers affiliated with a Norwegian research institution often have access to what are known as reference databases. These platforms allow for advanced searches for relevant research literature. The most commonly used commercial bases are Web of Science from Clarivate Analytics and Scopus from Elsevier. These databases offer the option to filter for open access, allowing for an overview of relevant open literature. If you're unsure about your access or need guidance in using the tool, please contact your institution's library.

 

Plug-ins

There are several browser add-ons that can simplify the process of finding legally open versions of research literature that lie behind the payment wall at the publisher. The tool is downloaded and installed in your browser. Search as you are used to and use a plug-in that shows you where you can find open versions of an article.

 

Contact

Contact an article author or another researcher.

There are several social media outlets where researchers can both build networks and exchange information. For example, ResearchGate and Academia are popular services. Be aware, however, that many researchers share more than they are strictly allowed to share with respect to copyright. Check the publisher / magazine's policy in the Sherpa / Romeo database, or on their website.

Contact the library

Articles that are not freely available and that your library does not have in its collections can be obtained from other libraries. Search for and order the article in Oria, and the library will try to get it for you.

 

 


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