Welch Medical Library Guides: Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Finding Free and Open Scholarship

Finding Free and Open Scholarship

Perhaps you no longer have access to JHU's subscription materials, or you might be interested in open access as a social justice issue and wish to utilize openly available articles in your own research right now. Below are groups of tools, databases, and resources that can help you find open access or freely available scholarship.

Open Access Databases and Repositories

Many repositories house open access research, including preprint servers and databases. A sample of repositories housing open access literature is listed below.

*Note that preprint servers (like medRxiv, bioRxiv, and arXiv) house research that has not yet undergone peer review.

PubMed Central
PubMed Central® is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection.
medRxiv
A free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences.
bioRxiv
A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.
arXiv
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open access archive for 1,844,260 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
The Directory of Open Access Journals
This database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.
MedEdPORTAL
Publications, presentations, curricula, and more about health science topics. From the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC)

Open Access Tools

The following tools and browser extensions will help you locate free and open access research.

Unpaywall Browser Extension
Download the browser extension. Click the green tab and skip the paywall on millions of peer-reviewed journal articles. It's fast, free, and legal.
Open Access Button
Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.

Open Data and Other Resources

The links below also house free and open access scholarship.

The Internet Archive
Full-text of books and other tests available, mostly published before 1923 and in the public domain, from a variety of Libraries.
The Directory of Open Access Books
36,529 academic peer-reviewed books from 598 publishers.
Re3data
Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions.
Dryad
A curated resource that makes research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of data types.

Open Patents

The Lens
The Lens serves linked open knowledge artefacts and metadata with tools to inform effective, efficient and equitable problem solving. Lens' patent search capabilities offer advanced boolean functions, structured search, biological search, classification search, filtering and sorting options to find the most relevant and important patents.