Skip to Main Content

Open Access and Depositing your Research: Finding Open Access material

Finding Open Access pdfs

         Free, legal research articles and data delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors

          Database of millions of author-uploaded research pdfs. FAQs

 

 

Open Access Images

Smithsonian Open Access

You can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Finding Creative Commons works

The Creative Commons website has a search engine that searches the Web for Creative Commons works, and Google (under its Advanced Search facility) has an option to search for materials that use Creative Commons.  Select usage rights and from drop down menu:  free to share or modify, even commercially.

N.B.

The latest version of the Creative Commons (CC) licence is 4.0 so make sure that any images you are using from other sources have this version applied.

Always check which CC version is being applied and avoid using earlier versions where possible.

If this is not possible, please check that you comply exactly with all the terms and conditions assocaiated with this version as litigation is possible and fines can be large.

Finding Open Access material

  • arXiv
    Open access to over 1 million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
  • Biomed Central
    BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher of 291 peer-reviewed open access journals
  • CORE
    The mission of CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide      and make them available to the public.
  • DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
    The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access provided that the book is available under an Open Access license (such as a Creative Commons license) and has been subjected to independent and external peer review prior to  publication.
  • Europe PMC
    offers free access to biomedical literature resources including:
    • 37 million + abstracts including over 30 million from PubMed
    • Europe PMC full text articles
    • Patent abstracts
    • National Health Service (NHS) clinical guidelines
    • Agricola records
    • Supplemented with Chinese Biological Abstracts
  • PLOS
    (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading  a transformation in research communication
  • PubMed
    PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may  include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.