Open Access & Institutional Repository
Discovery and Visibility
Open Access & Institutional Repository: Discovery and Visibility
Routes to Open Access
Do I have to pay for Open Access?
Policies Toggle Dropdown
Policies and Information for Depositors/Authors
Discovering Open Access articles
Searching for a specific article
Discovering articles
Repositories/Databases
Searching by keyword
Unpaywall, OA Button and CORE Discovery (in beta) are all Chrome and Firefox extensions that find legal open access copies of individual articles from both publishers and repositories.
Kopernio: a Chrome extension that finds articles from our library subscriptions and open access versions.
Google: if you find an article that is behind a paywall, try copy & pasting the article title into a search engine. If there is a copy in a repository it will often display on the first page of search results.
Can't find what you need?: if you can't find a legal open access version, use the library interlibrary loan service and we will source a copy, often within 24 hours. Please do not spend your own money, or grant money, on journal articles
Articles can be made open access (OA) on the journal website (gold OA) or via institutional and subject repositories (green OA, often involving an embargo set by the journal publisher).
Both Scopus and Web of Science have a filter to select only Open Access articles. They predominantly display articles that are gold OA, not the many thousands of articles that are green OA via repositories and preprint servers.
arXiv provides open access to research papers in physics and related disciplines. It includes articles not yet peer-reviewed/ published and allows access to cutting edge research.
BioMed Central is a Science, Technology and Medicine publisher of 254 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals. The collection of journals spans all areas of biology and medicine and includes broad interest titles alongside more specialist journals.
Sort Database Group
CORE gives you access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from over 600 Open Access repositories.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from many publishers. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ aims to cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that publish research and review papers in full text. They also use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be THE one stop shop for users of open access journals. Open access journals contained in this collection are journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.
ePrints Soton
ePrints Soton is the University's Institutional Research Repository.
Europe PMC is a unique, free, information resource for biomedical and health researchers. It includes 28 million+ abstracts and 2.6 million+ full text research articles from PubMed and PubMed Central
This archive (NORA) is the Institutional Repository for research publications and research outcomes of NERC Research Staff in its four wholly owned Research Centres. The research outcomes match those which UK researchers funded by AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC and NERC are expected to deposit in the RCUK Research Outcomes System.
Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit publisher, membership, and advocacy organization with a mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
PubMed is a free version of MEDLINE, the world's best-known medicine and clinical science database. MEDLINE covers literature from around the world since 1946, and it has a comprehensive set of controlled vocabulary called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms).
The aim of ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective.
CORE: a database that aggregates open access content from journals and repositories, useful for searching by keyword.
Dimensions: a research information database with an Open Access filter proving links to journals and preprint servers. Please note that we only have access to the free version of Dimensions.
Share: a free open data set of research outputs, useful for searching for preprints
Making Open Access work for you
For help or advice with any Open Access or ePrints Soton query:
email eprints@soton.ac.uk
or phone the ePrints team on 023 8059 2370 (internal extension 22370)
Post a preprint
Add to Pure
Open your research data
Promote and present your research
Posting your work to a preprint repository before peer review or submission to a journal:
Prevents scooping as it timestamps your work
Can lead to new collaborations
Can be cited in grant applications and progress reports rather than the work being stuck in a revise & resubmit process
Allows you to measure interest in the article
Allows appraisal from peers to determine if the work is ready for submission to a journal
See: Bourne PE, Polka JK, Vale RD, Kiley R (2017) Ten simple rules to consider regarding preprint submission. PLoS Comput Biol 13(5): e1005473. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005473
Sign up via Pure for an ORCID iD
This unique identifier eliminates name ambiguity, improves discoverability, saves you time in publisher and funder submissions and stays with you throughout your career even when you change institution.
Add your article to Pure
Upload a copy of your Accepted Manuscript (the version incorporating all changes resulting from peer review) to Pure as soon as your article is accepted by a publisher - this is all you need to do to fulfill both REF2021 and the University of Southampton Open Access policies.
publications on your Staff Profile page are automatically updated from Pure
Pure feeds ePrints Soton, our institutional repository. Your articles will display in Google searches and even if the publisher requires an embargo on the Accepted Manuscript, readers can use the Request a Copy button in ePrints Soton to ask for a copy of your article.
Sharing your research data encourages collaboration between researchers and can result in important new findings. This enhances your research profile and studies have shown a correlation between sharing research data and increased citations, for example Piwowar et al, 2007.
Effectively publicise your research
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Last Updated: Jan 15, 2020 4:34 PM
URL: https://library.soton.ac.uk/openaccess