Open access resources for your research

Faced with the barrier of accessing specialized information, typically because it requires payment, there is a variety of open access alternatives.

In my days as a student, researcher and teacher, I had these limitations, and it was not always easy or quick to manage a resource through the library network when it was not available in the databases contracted by the university. As a result, the literature review process had to be strategic to opt mostly for accessible resources, and the first step was to do the review only in open access sources and only if important references to a closed resource were found in these, escalate the search in closed information systems.

Nota

My background is in physics, at the level of personal tastes my passion is oriented towards astronomy and mathematics, and professionally I am a developer and have worked in data analytics and machine learning, so the sources may have a bias towards these areas.

Preprint repositories

Preprints are documents that authors publish before a formal publication (i.e., in indexed journals) and that do not have the format and branding of the journal (they are plain or simple versions, an unstyled text document). Typically publishers retain the rights to the final version of the document and not to the content itself which is what is available in the preprints (or due to legal issues in some cases, the postprints, shared after the indexed publication, since some publishers require that a preprint does not exist).

Perhaps the most important preprint repository is arXiv, a pioneer of digital open access, which gathers preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and economics. This repository is managed by Cornell University.

But this philosophy, concept and model later expanded and there is an (unofficial) family that covers other disciplines, as well as other preprint repositories.

In the last three cases, useful because they are very general lists, bear in mind that not all of them are strictly preprint servers, like finding Authorea or Zenodo in the list.

Digital libraries or archives

In some cases, we have the option to access free article resources that are not preprints, and that is through digital libraries (which can also include preprints). We also find digital archives of institutions committed to open resources or that, due to the use of public resources, have a commitment to an open data policy for the development of science.

  • Astrophysics Data System - ADS, digital library for researchers in astronomy and physics. Managed by Harvard and NASA.

  • JSTOR, is an open access digital archive for books and articles in different disciplines.

  • OAPEN, open access academic book resources.

  • NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), offers a variety of open access specialized resources, including books, standards, handbooks, code and software, and even articles (linked to the final version published under the open access model). To highlight some accesses and materials:

  • Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research: we will find access to technical reports, internal articles, thesis and an open access journal. Except for the journal, most of the downloadable content is in German. Although we will find the press releases in English.

  • The Review of Particle Physics: Particle physics handbook.

  • Zenodo: digital archive tool and repository provided by CERN for the promotion of open access and open science. It allows DOI assignment. Integrates with GitHub.

  • Figshare: digital archive tool and repository with integrations for GitHub, ORCID, Altmetric, and allows DOI assignment.

I think it is important to highlight some cases of digital libraries for general resources (it can also be useful in some cases of research or study at different educational levels).

  • Internet Archive - books, we will find a diversity of books, not only general ones, but also specialized ones. Internet Archive also contains collections of audio, videos, software and images.

  • Project Gutenberg, electronic books whose protection rights have expired in the United States. Audiobooks also apply.

  • El libro total: Colombian digital library, with a great diversity of material, which includes not only books but audiobooks, dictionaries, direct access to dictionaries from the books, access to author biographies from associated books. Access to art collections. It has a mobile app and a physical headquarters in Bucaramanga, Colombia.

Open access journals and articles

There are publication models that allow readers to access the final published material for free, without barriers, although not necessarily at a low cost for authors and institutions (for example, publishing in some cases has a higher cost, so that the publisher earns from the author what it stops earning from the reader), but there are also models that are completely accessible to authors.

This allows us to access resources of articles that had peer review, and therefore we are possibly reading a reliable article (there are many stories to show that peer review does not ensure quality, and perhaps, I will tell them in another blog post).

In this list, it is necessary to mention the case of overlay journals, which are a type of open access peer-reviewed journals with no costs for authors, that work by making article selection (or accepting submissions) from preprints. There are several cases based on arXiv and its family.

Collaborative networks

Undoubtedly, a collaborative network is an alternative. Official (such as processes through libraries), or unofficial (social networks and groups for exchange, or servers to share material).

  • Sci-Hub: Server primarily for research articles (also books).

  • Library Genesis (libgen): Server for books, articles, comics and other resources. Currently I don’t know a working link (the 3 main domains generate error 504).

The two resources mentioned here have continuous legal disputes and have been blocked in different countries. I have not been able to access LibGen, but Sci-Hub is perfectly functional (from Colombia).

This article was originally published in Spanish on 2024-06-02.