Find open resources

Explore a wide-ranging curated collection of freely available academic resources

The resources on this page include research papers, open access books, policy papers, patents, web archives and more. These materials provide valuable, unrestricted access to knowledge beyond traditional publishing channels, and it’s all free!

We still recommend that you begin any research project with the resources on the course resource help page for your subject. You can then move on to making use of some of the resources on this page, or even trying out some of our recommended AI tools for research.

For help with using these sources, you can contact your Academic Liaison Librarian, whose details you can find on your course resource help page. For more ways to get extra information resources for free, please check out our Go further, get more page.

Are these resources credible / reliable / peer-reviewed?

Some students and researchers worry about whether sources they find beyond the Library's databases are reliable.

Understanding the different versions of an academic article can help you to decide. Pre-prints share early research before peer review, while accepted manuscripts are peer-reviewed but not yet formatted by the journal. The version of record is the final, published form, though it may be behind a paywall.

Peer review is an important part of this process. If an author wants to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, they submit their article to that journal, and it is is then sent to other experts in that subject area for feedback. The author should fix any problems with the article before it is published. If the problems are significant, the article may not get published.

Look out for indications that the article has been peer-reviewed - for example a link or DOI to the final version on a publisher's website or details of the journal, which you can check to make sure that the journal is peer-reviewed.

Please see the guide below to help you to identify different versions of an article.

If you're a bit unsure, start with the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which has a huge range of peer-reviewed, fully open access journals (so the final version of the article is available open access).

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

This is a great place to start for access to a very large collection of articles published in peer reviewed, open access journals.

A quick guide to article versions

Pre-print

This is the earliest version of a paper.
It has not been peer-reviewed yet.
It’s usually shared by the author to get feedback before submitting to a journal, so it is a draft that the author is making public.
While this allows early access to new research findings, there could be significant changes before publication or it might be rejected.

Author's accepted manuscript

This is the version that has been peer-reviewed and accepted by a journal.
It includes the final changes suggested by reviewers but does not have the journal’s formatting, logo, or page numbers.
Universities often share this version in their open-access repositories (the Oxford Brookes repository is called RADAR).

Version of record

This is the final, published version in the journal.
It has been formatted, copyedited, and given a DOI (a permanent link).
If you find a paper on a publisher’s website with professional formatting and branding, that’s usually the version of record.

Open access articles

These are collections of open access articles and journals. In most of them you can search for individual articles using keywords as you would in the Library databases. Sometimes you can also browse by topic, by journal (if the articles have been published in a journal), by author or by insitution.

Core

Core is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers, aggregating open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide.

OpenAlex

OpenAlex is a large catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions. You can also export all of your search results easily and for free.

OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE covers all disciplines, with a strong focus on European research. Also includes datasets and other research outputs.

Digital Commons Network

Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.

JStor and Artstor

Open access content on JSTOR and Artstor, which includes digital humanities content like special collections and archive material.

Open Library of the Humanities

The Open Library of the Humanities offers open access journals in humanities fields. These journals are free to read and to publish in.

African Journals Online

African Journals Online is a platform that indexes hundreds of high quality African-published journals.

Scielo

Scielo is an open access collection covering research from Latin America and Spain - available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

BASE

Not everything on BASE is open access, but you can select a filter to prioritise open access content.

Open access books

These are collections of open access books. Some have historic texts that are no longer under copyright, while others are newer books that have been legally published on open access platforms by the author.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free e-books. These tend to be older books that are ‘out of copyright’ and is a great way to access historical texts.

Directory of Open Access Books

The Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.

UPL Open

University Press Library Open (UPLOpen) is a collection of open access scholarship from many of the world's most prestigious academic presses with a central focus on achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

OAPEN

OAPEN offers more than 90,000 peer reviewed OA books and chapters, using an open source platform.

Project MUSE

Project MUSE offers open access books, journals, and digital humanities works from several distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers. Please note that not everything on this platform is open access.

Policy, patents and statistics

Use Policy Commons to find national and international policy documents. The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides a wide variety of statistics on the UK population. Lens.org is a source of patents and scientific datasets.

Policy Commons

UK Office for National Statistics

Lens.org