What is Open Access?

Open Access research is research that is available without fees, restrictions, or institutional affiliation. This means anyone with an internet connection can read the full content of the work. The majority of academic publishers require readers and libraries to pay journal subscriptions to access their publications, which can be costly and prohibitive. Creating and sharing Open Access research helps level the playing field for scholars by removing financial barriers.

Of course, this can mean the costs of publishing are simply passed on to the writer, instead of the reader. And not all information or knowledge is meant to be accessible for everyone – for example, many Indigenous tribes have knowledge that is only meant to be shared at certain times and with certain people.

It’s not a perfect system! But spreading awareness of and support for Open Access can help to make this option easier for writers to pursue, and makes work that is already free more visible to anyone interested.

This project was sponsered by the Open Access Digital Theological Library, which curates and catalogs Open Access work in OCLC WorldCat – a huge online platform that connects records from thousands of libraries together, making it easy to search for what you need from libraries near you. The majority of work in this collection is cataloged in OCLC.

Open Access Directories

Here are more places to find Open Access research on a variety of subjects:

Usage Rights

Most Open Access work is covered under a Creative Commons license. For information about the usage rights of a specific work, please check the item’s original Institutional Repository page (click “link to object” on the record’s page). To learn more about the Creative Commons and the types of licenses, visit their site.