"Open Access Explained!" video from Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics), licensed under CC BY 4.0.
SPARC defines Open Access as "the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results - to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives."
Open access materials are freely accessible but most Open Access creators retain their copyrights. Open Access materials differ from Open Educational Resources which are available under an open license that allows for reuse, adaptation, and redistribution.
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.
BioMed Central Open Access by Springer International Publishing
A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high-quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series. Expanding beyond biomedicine into the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering disciplines, BMC now offers a wider portfolio of subject fields on a single open access platform.
Cambridge University Press Wholly Gold Open Access Journals by Cambridge University Press
Cambridge OA serves authors and the wider community by publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed OA content that allows readers to redistribute, re-use and adapt the content in new works.
Free, digital archive of scientific research and literature produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This online archive is composed of curated collections tailored for public health research needs. This repository is retained indefinitely and is available for public health professionals, researchers, as well as the general public.
Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.
Early Journal Content, articles published prior to the last 95 years in the United States, or prior to the last 143 years if initially published internationally, are freely available to all.
Thousands of Open Access ebooks are available from top scholarly publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press. This includes Open Access titles in Spanish.
Making of America
Making of America Collection, a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan and Cornell University, is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.
NCBI Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Search, read, and discover.
Oxford University Press Journals Open Access Collection
Oxford University Press (OUP) is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We embrace both green and gold open access (OA) publishing to support this mission.
Oxford University Press Open Access Books
The following titles have been made available as open access publications under a Creative Commons license. They are free to read worldwide through the relevant OUP online platforms, including Oxford Scholarship Online or Oxford Medicine Online. In addition to these titles, there are eighteen titles made available through the OAPEN-UK project on the same basis.
A free PDF version of each title is available to download from our website. This version is free to read and share according to the terms of the Creative Commons publication license, provided that the author is properly cited. Please note that third party materials included in the publication may be subject to copyright restrictions; proper permission to reuse this material should be sought from the rights holder. Print and eBook versions of these titles are available to purchase.
O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.
Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright. Maybe the book was written collectively by a particular community, as in the case of our Community Press books.
Project Muse Open Access Books
Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books, journals, and digital humanities works from several distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These materials are freely available to libraries and users around the world.
Public Library of Science (PLoS) Journals Open Access
PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
Purdue University Press Open Access Journals
Purdue University Press, founded in 1960, is the publishing arm of Purdue University. Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, the Press provides quality resources in several key subject areas including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine and other limited disciplines in the humanities and sciences. This series contains Open Access journals published by the Purdue University Press.
Sage Journals Open Access Journals
All articles published in the journals provide worldwide, barrier-free access to the full-text of articles online, immediately on publication under a creative commons license. All articles are rigorously peer-reviewed retaining the quality hallmarks of the academic publishing process that authors would experience in publishing in any traditional SAGE journal.
Springer Nature OA Free Journals by Springer International Publishing
We publish nearly 600 fully open access journals in all disciplines – from the life sciences to the humanities. Authors also have the option to publish their article under an open access license in more than 1,900 of our subscription-based journals. Our portfolio focuses on robust and insightful research, supporting the development of new areas of knowledge and making ideas and information accessible around the globe. Across our publishing imprints there are leading multidisciplinary and community-focused journals that offer rigorous, high-impact open access. Many of our titles are also published in partnership with academic societies, enabling them to achieve their own open research ambitions.
Taylor & Francis Open Access eBooks
Explore Open Access books and book chapters published by Taylor & Francis, and discover content available across subject areas including economics, environment & sustainability, geography, history, law, media & cultural studies, politics, sociology and more.
Taylor and Francis Open Access Journals
Taylor & Francis is one of the world’s largest publishers of open access research. We publish over 180 high-quality full open access journals, ranging across disciplines and subject areas.
University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection
The University of Michigan Press is a vital component of UM Library's Michigan Publishing, which is the primary academic publishing division of the University. In partnership with our authors and series editors, we publish in a wide range of humanities and social science disciplines. We champion the Library's research and scholarly communication missions through our global digital and print publishing and distribution programs.
University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Edition
The ULS has digitized over 115,000 unique objects (resulting in over two million digital pages and images!) from several special collecting units, including the Archives & Special Collections and Center for American Music as well as several Pitt Faculty members and regional partner institutions. Note that guides (i.e., finding aids) to our archives and manuscript collections are included here too.
Wiley Online Library Free Backfiles
Several Wiley-Blackwell journals offer free access to their backfiles on Wiley Online Library. All content prior to a given date is made free online to all.
Wiley Online Library Open Access
Wiley Open Access publishes authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across many research disciplines. Wiley Open Access journals are supported by a network of authoritative journals and societies as well as internationally renowned editorial board members. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. Wiley Open Access publishes a number of online journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.