Open Access Resources

What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) publishing means scholarly publications are made freely available on the web for anyone to read. Publication costs are paid by authors or funding councils rather than subscription fees paid by libraries. This research can be freely downloaded and read under an open licence without you needing to be authenticated as a UoB member.

You can find OA journal articles, book chapters, whole books, reports and other content types. We have listed some useful databases of OA content below but you will also see OA content intermingled with paid content in many of our digital library resources. Look for the words "open access" or this logo

• CORE
  CORE harvests open access content that has been added to university repositories around the world.

• DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books)
  DOAB indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books.

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
  Covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. Aims to cover all subjects and languages.

• OAIster
  Harvests digital resources from open archive collections around the world.

• OApen library
  A collection of freely accessible academic books.

• Open Textbook Library
  A collection of textbooks that have been made freely available.

• Project Gutenberg
  A collection of free ebooks, mostly older works where copyright has expired.