Short course design - information resources: Open access
What is Open Access
Open access in this context means research literature that can be freely accessed by anyone in the world via the internet and which would be available to any student on your short course.
If you use, refer to or recommend open access content in your teaching you should ensure:
- authors or creators of the works are acknowledged and a full citation included
- you have checked any licences to determine what restrictions there are on reuse. Many resources are licenced under a creative commons licence - find out more on the Creative Commons page of this guide
Resources/directories for open access resources
- COREan index of open access research papers from repositories and journals across the world.
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)indexes and provides access to open access articles and journals
- Open Educational Resourcesaccess to teaching and learning materials which are freely available
Tools for finding open access resources
- Unpaywalluse this browser extension to easily locate open access articles. If an open access version of an article you are reading is available a green open padlock will show on your screen and link you directly to that version.
Web of Science or Scopus - these databases won't be available to your students but you can use them to help you pull together a list of open access journal articles and scholarly book chapters. Perform your search as usual. On the left hand side of the results page select open access from the list of refinement options and choose to limit to these resources only. Web of Science also has an option to narrow to items which include associated data which can be a useful way to identify datasets that are available to use