Find openly available research
Services and databases
BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Academic search engine containing over 240 million documents from more than 8,000 sources.
CORE. The aggregator claims to possess the world's largest collection of scientific articles.
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.
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OA material (preprint, postprint, and published versions) and "gray literature", i.e., research literature that is not peer-reviewed, such as conference papers or research reports.
NVA (The Norwegian Research Information Repository) collects publications and other research results, and makes them openly available in a common national solution.
OpenAlex catalogs nearly 500 million scholarly works, linking them to authors, institutions and funders. The service is fully open.
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.
Semantic Scholar. Free academic search engine run by the Allen Institute for AI. Indexes over 200 million publications and offers strong features for citation analysis and identifying influential papers.
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:
Biology, medicine
bioRxiv. An open archive of preprint versions of articles from medical research.
Europe PMC.Open full-text database for biomedical and health science publications, including preprint versions. Covers a broader range of sources than PubMed Central.
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.
Geoscience
EarthArXiv. Open preprint archive for geoscience and related fields.
Social Sciences and Humanities
Humanities Commons. An archive of open articles, books, and other publications in the humanities.
SocArXiv. An open archive for preprint articles in social sciences, articles in progress, and other social sciences such as law, education, etc.
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 Jisc's Open policy finder (previously Sherpa/Romeo), 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.