Open Access Tools
Open access discovery...........................................................................................................................1
Disseminating your open access work...................................................................................................4
Tracking your open access work............................................................................................................7
Open access discovery
Use the resources below to find open access articles, books, data and theses.
Our top tools: Unpaywall, Open Access Button, Google Scholar
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
BASE indexes over 90 million open access documents in over 4000 repositories.
CORE
CORE aggregates open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide to make
them available to the public. You can search for articles and datasets and download directly from the
site. If you find an article you like, CORE will find similar ones by analysing the text of that article.
Data
If you are looking for open data to reuse, please see the list of links on our Research Data
Management pages.
DART-Europe E-theses Portal
A searchable index providing access to 729,982 open access research theses from over 600
universities in 28 European countries.
Digital Commons Network
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of
universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting
institutions, the network includes a growing searchable collection of peer-reviewed journal articles,
book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly
work.
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Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
A fully searchable directory of Open Access academic, peer reviewed books.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A community-curated list of open access journals, which aims to be the starting point for all
information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. DOAJ aims to be
comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control
system to guarantee the content.
EThOS
A national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions
maintained by the British Library. There are over 450,000 records relating to theses awarded by over
120 institutions. Around 160,000 of these also provide access to the full text thesis, either via
download from the EThOS database or via links to the institution’s own repository
Europe PubMedCentral
Europe PMC is a repository, providing access to worldwide life sciences articles, books, patents and
clinical guidelines. There is a filter for open access content on the search page.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides links to full text, including subscription access content while being used
within the School’s computer network and open access content in university repositories.
Kopernio
Kopernio is a plugin for Google Chrome. Users are required to set-up an account, but once installed
the browser plugin will check for open access and accessible subscription-only content when
browsing publishers’ websites. (Formerly known as Canary Haz).
OAIster
Union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. This catalog was built
through harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAIster includes more than 50 million records that
represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors.
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Open Access Button
Open Access Button is a discovery tool for finding open access versions of articles. It is available as
both a browser plugin (Firefox and Chrome) and a search engine. If the plugin is installed, while
browsing journal articles the tool will alert you if a paywalled article is available open access
elsewhere (e.g. on a university repository). Via the Open Access Button homepage, you can search
using the article URL, DOI, PubMed ID, PubMed Central ID, Title or Citation. If an item is not available
open access, the tool allows users to request the item from the authors.
Open Access Library
Open Access Library (www.oalib.com) is an academic search engine and publisher. You can
download research papers for free and submit your paper to it. It is a shared academic database.
Open Trials
A collaborative and open linked database for all available structured data and documents on clinical
trials, threaded together by individual trial. With a versatile and expandable data schema, it is
initially designed to host and match the following documents: registry entries; links, abstracts, or
texts of academic journal papers; portions of regulatory documents describing individual trials;
structured data on methods and results extracted by systematic reviewers or other researchers;
clinical Study Reports; and additional documents such as blank consent forms, blank case report
forms, and protocols.
Smart Servier Medical Art
A library of medical images, designed to provide illustrations for publications
and slideshows. All images licensed under CC BY.
Unpaywall
Like Open Access Button, Unpaywall attempts to find open access versions of articles if you
encounter a paywall while browsing journal articles. It is only available as a browser plugin.
WorldPop
WorldPop provides an open access archive of spatial demographic datasets for Central and South
America, Africa and Asia to support development, disaster response and health applications. The
methods used are designed with full open access and operational application in mind, using
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transparent, fully documented and peer-reviewed methods to produce easily updatable maps with
accompanying metadata and measures of uncertainty.
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Disseminating your open access work
Explore some of the tools below if you are looking for ways to make your work open access, to
further disseminate your research and to measure some of the impact of your research.
Our top tools: Sherpa/Romeo, ORCID, Think.Check.Submit
Author Carpentry
A researcher-to-research training and outreach programme for open authoring and publishing. The
programme covers various topics, including scholarly identity and reputation, research impact, and
picking the right journal. Also see the Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry programmes, which
aim to teach researchers skills in data usage and management and research computing skills,
respectively.
Cabell’s Blacklist
Cabells, a scholarly analytics company, have issued a list of criteria for considering what constitutes a
predatory journal. Their “blacklist” is a paid-for service, but the list of criteria can be consulted for
free.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use copyright licenses to make a simple and standardized
way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work – on conditions of your
choice. The website includes a license-choosing tool, which allows you to select the right license for
you, creating the web code at the same time.
LSHTM Data Compass
LSHTM Data Compass is a curated repository of research data and other reusable outputs produced
by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and its collaborators.
LSHTM Research Online
LSHTM Research Online is freely accessible online database of research conducted by staff from
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Where possible we will provide access to the full
text of research articles. Where we are unable to provide the full text we will hold the bibliographical
information and provide links to where the full text can be accessed.
OpenDOAR
As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) lets
you search for repositories or search repository contents. Additionally, the website provides tools
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and support to both repository administrators and service providers in sharing best practice and
improving the quality of the repository infrastructure
ORCID
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) provides unique alphanumeric codes that identify
particular academic authors. These permanent identifiers are intended to be attached to authors
throughout their careers, so that their work can be disambiguated from those with similar names. A
definitive profile including all your publications can be created. It is highly recommended that all
School authors sign-up for an ORCID account, as they are increasingly required by journals and
funders.
SHERPA/FACT
SHERPA/FACT is a tool to help researchers check if the journals in which they wish to publish their
results comply with their funder's requirements for open access to research.
SHERPA/JULIET
SHERPA Juliet is a searchable database and single focal point of up-to-date information concerning
funders’ policies and their requirements on open access, publication and data archiving.
SHERPA RoMEO
SHERPA RoMEO is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies
from around the world and provides summaries of self-archiving permissions and conditions of
rights given to authors on a journal-by-journal basis.
Think Check Attend
Aims to guide and assist researchers and scholars to judge the legitimacy and academic credentials
of conferences in order to help them decide whether to or not attend. Provides guidelines that help
researchers to differentiate between an authentic conference and the one they should avoid.
Think Check Submit
Campaign run by a coalition of publishers and other organisations to help researchers identify
“trusted” (i.e. reputable) journals for their research. It’s essentially a three point checklist to ensure
your chosen journal is reputable, and is highly recommended if you have not heard of a particular
journal or publisher before.
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Twitter
Twitter is an invaluable tool for networking with peers and colleagues. It is also useful for posting
updates about your work and links to your new publications.
Zenodo
A general purpose open access repository if you are unable to use our Research Online repository.
Zenodo allows you to deposit datasets, software, reports and other research outputs, and you can
get DOIs for your material.
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Tracking your open access work
Alongside citation counts, there are various ways of measuring the academic and wider attention
your work has received.
Altmetric
Various publishers now include Altmetric scores on journal article webpages. This score indicates the
attention the article has received across the internet, including academic citations, mentions on
Twitter and blogposts, and news stories related to the article. Most Nature Publishing Group journals
now include Altmetric scores.
Kudos
Kudos is a research impact platform that helps you to identify and demonstrate the influence of
research articles. Unlike Altmetric, Kudos allows you to create a profile to collect evidence of the
influence of your work.
Publish or Perish
This is a free programme that allows you to calculate your personal h-index (a measure of your
academic impact) and other metrics. Various tutorials are available from the Publish or Perish
website.
