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Effective Research Publishing Handbook

Mae'r dudalen hon hefyd ar gael yn Gymraeg

CORE

Increasing visibility of Open Access content

Unlocked padlock logoCORE

Search the world’s largest collection of open access research papers

It's the biggest collection of open access full texts, making it an unparalleled research tool

Read about the huge, global and widely used data hosted by CORE

Finding Open Resources

Using repositories as sources of supply for free online access to scholarly publications.

Increasingly full-text peer reviewed research articles are available through institutional and subject repositories. Open access resources can be used to find published information swiftly and often without cost. Open access material includes journal articles, scholarly and scientific monographs, educational resources, metadata, digitised material and research data.

Search via:

  • Cronfa - Swansea University institutional repository
  • Cronfa E-Theses - Swansea University open access theses
  • Swansea Vision Swansea University Computer Vision & Machine Learning Group

  • African Journals Online provides access to scholarly research publications from Africa
  • arXiV - Open access research papers in physics and related disciplines. This is a subject pre-print service
  • BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search) - Access over 120 million documents from 6000+ sources. >60% of indexed full text documents are available via open access
  • BioImage Archive -  The BioImage Archive is a public data resource that archives and makes available biological image data, of all scales, from molecules to entire organisms. A central archive promotes open data, provides reference data for the research community and allows for new scientific discoveries to be made with existing data across all imaging modalities and accelerates the development of new and improved image-analysis methods. 
  • bioRxiv - This is a subject pre-print service for Biology
  • CogPrints – Self-archived papers in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, Philosophy, Biology
  • CORE - Aggregating the world’s largest collection of open access research papers
  • DOAB - Discover Open Access books
  • DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Europe PMC - Search worldwide, life-sciences literature
  • HathiTrust Digital Library - Search a collection of millions of digitised titles from Libraries worldwide
  • NORA - NERC Open Research Archive
  • PhilArchive - The largest open access e-print archive in philosophy. Formerly known as the PhilPapers Archive, it is built on and integrated with the PhilPapers database.
  • PhilSci Archive - Pre-print  service for the Philosophy of Science 
  • PubMed - Free MEDLINE clinical science and medicine database. Some free articles available
  • redalyc.org provides access to research published across Latin America and the Caribbean
  • RePEc – Research Papers in Economics
  • SocArXiv - open Archive of the Social Sciences. This is a subject pre-print service
  • SSRN -  An interdisciplinary service
  • Unpaywall - An open database for free scholarly articles. Get an Add-on for your browser to automatically check for legal open access articles

Disciplinary and multi disciplinary repositories

  • OAD - An extensive list of OA disciplinary repositories or subject repositories is available via the Open Access Directory (OAD) site.

Open Access Books
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books: Search for full text books.

OAPEN: OA Books Toolkit

Open Educational Resources

  • OER Commons is a high quality public digital library providing content from a worldwide community of educators.
  • MERLOT The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers. View the YouTube introduction.

Pre-Print Servers
Preprint manuscripts are the Author's Original Manuscript (AOM) before journal peer-review. There are many online subject pre-print repositories which contain early versions of research articles. Some academic disciplines commonly use preprint repositories, e.g ArXiv, SocArXiv etc.

Swansea University Open Research Data

  • Zenodo for the Swansea University Open Research Data Community

In Your Research

If you can find an appropriate data set to use this can save a colossal amount of time in data collection. An increasing number of funders are making Open Data a requirement, it may be useful when looking at funders to look at the data they have already published and made available. 

If you are interested in using Open data, browse the repositories provided in the 'Data' tab.

There are also a number of Open Access browser plug-ins to enable you to streamline your research and access any paper which has been made Open Access. We would recommend Unpaywall and CORE.

A great place to start with Open Research is the Open Science Framework. This platform can help you streamline your project, keep it private or allow it to be completely public from the outset to increase transparency and dissemination of results as you go along. The platform can help with with pre-registering a project, providing a template or designing protocols, and integrates with key services like ORCID, DataCite and CrossRef.