Open access sources

Google Books

Google Books gives access to millions of scanned books. However, it does not usually provide full text access. Google Books searches inside books, making it good for researching topics normally covered on only a few pages in large volumes. Some books are more appropriate for academic study than others, so always check:

• Who are the authors? Are they researchers or university tutors or experienced professionals/practitioners? Does the book have endorsements from other researchers and university tutors?
• For whom it is written? Various books are written for different audiences, e.g. the general public, undergraduate or postgraduate students, specialists in a particular subject. Choose those that you can understand and leave aside those that don’t make sense or seem too basic.
• Who is the publisher? Have they published other academic titles? If the publisher is obscure or unknown to you, check again that the author is a reputable researcher and that the book has endorsements from other researchers and academic institutions.

Directory of Open Access Books

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - search for books on your subject.

Open Directory of Open Access Repositories

Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) - includes academic journal articles and books; click on Advanced Search; filter your search by content type, subject, country, and region.

Search engines

• Google Scholar
  
• Semantic Scholar
  
• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) – a search engine operated by Bielefeld University Library. More than half of the academic resources provided are open access. –

Plug-ins

Unpaywall – integrates with a Chrome browser and compares the browsed pages with its database of scholarly publications on open access.

Interdisciplinary repositories and collections

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – search for journals and articles on your subject.
• Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) – includes academic journal articles and books; click on Advanced Search; filter your search by content type, subject, country and region.
• Electronic Journals Library – service providing full-text ejournals; choose your subject.
• Connecting Repositories (CORE) – aggregation of content from open access repositories and journals.
• Science.gov – search engine by the US federal government.
• JSTOR – although JSTOR is a subscription database, registered users (sign up hereLinks to an external site.) can freely access 100 articles per month.
• SpringerOpen – search for journals on your subject.

Unpublished academic research

• EThOS – a database of doctoral theses maintained by the British Library.
• EBSCO Open Dissertations – a database of theses and dissertations.
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) - an archive of electronic theses and dissertations.
• University of Roehampton PURE research repository
• Solent University PURE research repository
• Ulster University PURE research repository
• Northumbria University FigShare research repository
• Middlesex University research repository

Economics, business and finance

• Econbiz is a service of the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) Leibniz Information Centre for Economics containing journals, working papers and conferences in Business and Economics. Select Open Access only.
• Annual reviews – journals on economics, financial economics, resource economics, organisational behaviour and statistics.

Computer science

• ArXiv – archive of journal articles.

US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) – makes discoverable over 70 years of research results from DOE and its predecessor agencies. Research results include journal articles/accepted manuscripts and related metadata; technical reports; scientific research datasets and collections; scientific software; patents; conference and workshop papers; books and theses; and multimedia.

These research aids require signup, but there is typically a free-to-use option:

• Open Knowledge Maps
• Connected Papers
• LitMaps
• Research Rabbit

• Accounting and finance open access data sources – (University of Bristol)
• Accounting and finance open access academic sources – (University of Bristol)
• City Business Library (CBL) – see the CBL recommended websites.
• World Bank Open Data – free access to global development data.
• International Monetary Fund (IMF) – economic and financial data and statistics; includes World Economic Outlook (WEO) databases.
• Business, economic and financial information – search engines, UK, EU and international data, datasets and databases (company, country and market data, statistics, business case studies, business and consumer surveys, academic journal articles on business).
• Food and Agriculture Organization corporate statistical database (FAOSTAT)- free access to food and agriculture data.
• British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) – economic data (surveys, reviews and forecasts).
• EU Open Data Portal (EU ODP) – open data published by EU institutions and bodies; click on the Data tab; search datasets by subject, group and publisher.
• Find open data – data published by central government, local authorities and public bodies; select your topic; filter by publisher and format.
• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – the World Factbook provides country profiles and comparisons.
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) – includes publications, working papers, time series); contains the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) IDEAS database of economic research.
• European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) – freely available European standards.
• Office National Statistics (ONS) – this nationally-recognised body specialises in collecting, analysing and disseminating statistics about the UK's economy, society and population.

• Solent university
• Ulster University: Finding QA sources | Business Statistics
• University of Roehampton