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Guide: Open Access: Finding OA Material

An introduction to Open Access - resources and publishing

Finding Open Access material

The Open Access movement works both ways - it is not just you making your research outputs open access, but also you making use of research outputs made available this way by others. There is a wide range of authors, institutions and organisations participating in this movement and there is no single way to locate open access material. The information below explains how you can discover and use this material.

Directories and Search Engines

Although you can find open access material through general search engines such as Google Scholar, there are some which are designed for open access material only.

Subject Specific Repositories

Books

Dissertations & Theses

Increasingly dissertations and theses are being made available online as open access. Many institutions now require that doctoral students deposit their thesis in an open access repository at the time of submission and some universities are digitising older theses to make the full text available online.

The below links are sources of electronic theses and dissertations, although please note that not all are open access or available electronically and you may encounter these in your search results.

Contact Us

Email openaccess@sruc.ac.uk with enquiries on making your papers OA, the REF OA requirements, the SRUC Repository or for further information on OA in general.