More than just free access to scientific publications, Open Access advocates a method of dissemination on the Internet that allows works to be read, downloaded, used, transmitted, printed and derived, provided that the authors are cited. This generally involves original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source documents, images and graphics, multimedia scientific documents, etc.

Directories

Subject archives

There are many disciplinary open archives giving access to pre-publications, working papers and articles (final manuscript / postprint).

Lists of open archives by discipline:
 
Agriculture
Anthropology
Art history
Biology / Life sciences
Business
Classics
Cognitive science
Computer science
Earth science
Economics
Engineering
Environmental science
Humanities in general		 Law
Library and information science
Linguistics
Literature
Mathematics
Medicine
Philosophy
Physics
Political science
Psychology
Sciences in general
Social sciences in general
Technology in general
Full list

Other resources

​​​​Physics

  • NASA Technical Report Server: The NASA STI Repository (also known as the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)) provides access to NASA metadata records, full-text online documents, images, and videos. The types of information included are conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information (STI) created or funded by NASA.
  • INSPIRE-HEP: INSPIRE is a trusted community hub that helps researchers to share and find accurate scholarly information in high energy physics.
  • PhysDoc: simultaneous search of different repositories containing scientific publications available online in the field of physics.
Humanities and social sciences
  • Isidore: A research platform providing access to digital data in the humanities and social sciences.
  • Jurn: The JURN Directory contains around 3,000 live Web links to selected open access or otherwise free e-journals in the arts & humanities, nearly all of which are indexed and made searchable in my JURN search engine. Predatory titles are excluded.
  • Pascal / Francis: The site is an archive of the PASCAL and FRANCIS bibliographic databases in exact, human and social sciences, produced by the Inist-CNRS from 1972 to 2015
    • Pascal covers the fields of science, technology and medicine
    • Francis covers 15 disciplines in humanities and social sciences
Political science
  • GRIP: Research and information group on peace and security
  • Chaillot Papers: Chaillot Papers are the Institute's flagship publication. Written by the Institute’s Analysts, as well as external experts and based on collective work or individual research, they deal with all subjects of current relevance to the Union’s security.
  • EU bookshop: UE publications
Information sciences
  • @SIC: open archive in information and communication sciences, managed by the CNRS Centre for Direct Scientific Communication

Institutional archives

Belgique France
  • HAL: archive developed by the CCSD (CNRS) to provide access to the online scientific production of French researchers.

Free services to increase access to scientific literature

Services

  • Request copy: for scientific publications that cannot immediately be made available in Open Access in an institutional repository, anyone wishing to do so can fill in a form that sends an email to the author asking whether he or she agrees to make the document available. This function is available in DI-fusion.
  • Unpaywall: service allowing you to find Open Access versions of the articles you are currently consulting.
  • OAbutton: Based on a DOI, PMID, title or citation, the service attempts to provide access to the article, in the publisher's version, legally and free of charge. If the service does not find an Open Access version, it contacts the author to encourage him or her to make the article available in Open Access. This service also exists as an extension in Firefox
  • LazyScholar: this service, which is also available as a browser extension extension, mainly searches Google Scholar to see if there is an Open Access version of the article consulted; it shows various citation measures (Altmetrics, Google Scholar h-index, etc.).
  • Bouton Google Scholar button: this browser extension (Google Chrome, Firefox) makes it easy to search for university articles by accessing Google from any web page.
  • Open Access Helper: this browser extension, which can also be used on smartphones, provides access to a wide range of Open Access documents.

Moteurs de recherches

  • Google Scholar: allows you to discover academic works in all disciplines, with full access where possible.
  • OAISter: offers a simultaneous search of a large number of repositories containing articles, theses, reports and other digitalised documents
  • BASE: one of the largest search engines in the world, particularly for Open Access university resources.