Searching Academic Databases: Open Access Databases

There are different ways in which Journal Articles are made available via Open Access Journals

Gold OA– Full access to all the articles on the journal website, under a creative commons or similar license. An Article Processing Charge (APC) is usually paid by the author (or other funder).
Hybrid – a subscription journal where the publisher allows authors to pay an  APC to make individual articles open access. It may also be waived if there is an OA agreement in place with the publisher by your institution. Some articles in the Journal will be Open Access and some behind a paywall.
Diamond/Platinum- journals that publish OA but do not charge APCs. These are funded by institutions, advertising, philanthropy, etc.
Bronze - journals that are free to read online but do not have a license - they are not generally available for reuse.
Green – refers to self-archiving (republishing) generally of the pre or post-print of articles in repositories.  This will need to conform to the copyright restrictions of the publisher of the article.

Open Access Databases aggregate and make available open access articles, journals, books, theses and datasets.

These resources are available for everybody to view as opposed to being behind paywalls and requiring a subscription to access them.

Examples Include:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and PubMed Central (PMC).

The  DOAJ, lists only fully gold open access journals while the PMC also hosts articles from hybrid journals.

Preprint servers: host articles that have not yet been reviewed as open access copies. These articles are subsequently submitted for peer review by both open access or subscription journals, however the preprint always remains openly accessible.

Examples include ArXiv, BioRxiv, or SSRN

Open Access Repositories: Authors self archive their research publications to a Open Access Institutional, Subject, Scholarly Society or Funder Repository. There may be restrictions imposed by publishers so many authors deposit a pre-print, a post print or the accepted version of the manuscript. The published version can also be deposited when the embargo period has expired.

MU Research Archive Library (MURAL) makes the outputs of MU's research activities freely available online. 

ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and OpenDOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories) provide indexes of the repositories themselves.

The SHERPA/RoMEO site maintains a list of the different publisher copyright and self-archiving policies 

For more on Open Access, check out the guide here
 

• Brill Open eBook Collection: Over 400 open access humanities and social science ebooks.
• Directory of Open Access Books:  The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Contains hundreds of freely available academic books.
• JSTOR Open Access eBooks :Thousands of open access ebooks available from scholarly publishers.
• Knowledge Unlatched: Knowledge Unlatched makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the future development of the Open Access infrastructure.
• Manchester Openhive:  Over 200 freely available ebooks published by Manchester University Press. Subject coverage includes, the arts and humanities, and social sciences.
• OAPEN - Open Access Publishing in European Networks:  A quality controlled collection of open access books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
• Open Book Publishers : UK independent open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences. Over 200 titles freely available to read online and download.
• Open Textbook Library: Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted.
• Open Textbooks: A curated collection of open textbooks available to read online and download.
• SpringerOpen Books: Open access ebooks in a wide range of subjects within science, technology and medicine.
• sourced from: https://lancaster.libguides.com/OpenAccessResources 

DART Europe eThesis Portal

DART-Europe was founded in 2005 as a partnership of national and university libraries and consortia to improve global access to European research theses.

EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximise the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses. There are approximately 500,000 records relating to theses awarded by over 120 institutions. Around 260,000 of these also provide access to the full text thesis, either via download from the EThOS database or via links to the institution’s own repository.

Maynooth University Research Archive Library (MURAL) is an institutional repository of ePublications which showcases the research output of Maynooth University and St. Patrick's College staff and postgraduate students. This open access ensures the widest possible dissemination and impact for our work in Maynooth and contributes to the growing body of research literature that is now freely available online.

ArtSTOR Public Collections 

Artstor’s ever-growing Public Collections offer approximately 1.3 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from partner museums. Anyone may view and download these collections; no subscription or login required.

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a national digital repository for Ireland’s humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage data. You can browse and search across multiple collections from some of the finest Irish institutions. 

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. 

Open Grey

System for Information on Grey Literature in Europe, is your open access to 700.000 bibliographical references of grey literature (paper) produced in Europe and allows you to export records and locate the documents.

Examples of grey (gray) literature include technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, some conference papers, some official publications, and other types of grey literature.

OpenGrey covers Science, Technology, Biomedical Science, Economics, Social Science and Humanities.

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.