How to Find Openly Available Electronic Resources
Openly available resources, known as "Open Access" are resources that are not locked behind a subscription paywall and therefore openly available to all. The College Library is a proponent of open access publishing and actively supports faculty that choose to publish in open access journals. For more information about open access publishing, please visit our library guide found here.
There are many open access resources. We have provided information below about how to access some of these resources in two primary ways:
- Using our library catalog
- Using our curated list below
Use the Library Catalog
When you use Discover, the College Library's catalog, found on our homepage, you can limit your search results to "open access" in two places as illustrated by the screenshots below:
Find Open Access Resources Online
Directory of Open Access Books
More than 13,000 Academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from over 280 publishers
Offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
Digital Public Library of America
DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format. The cultural institutions participating in DPLA represent the richness and diversity of America itself, from the smallest local history museum to our nation’s largest cultural institutions.
SpringerOpen publishes a wide selection of open access books across various disciplines.
Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.
Free Access to over 12,000 full text, scholarly journals in a variety of subjects. Featured resources include:
- ScienceDirect (Elsevier) Open Access Journals.
- Springer open access journals
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Taylor & Francis Open Access Journals
- BioMed Central
HathiTrust is a growing, global partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 140 members in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. Be sure to select "full view only" to find open access resources.
Repository of electronic preprints (known as e-prints) approved for publication after moderation, that consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance.
Free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.
Free, open scholarly platform for library and information science.
Open archive for research on mind and contemplative practices. Includes working papers, preprints, and published
papers.
Free online repository service for unpublished preprints in the psychological sciences.
Comprises more than 36 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed and publisher sites.
Free online repository service for unpublished preprints in the social sciences.