Open access to published work

Whether you already have an idea for a new research area or are uncertain where to start, gaining an overview of the current literature is critical.  Fortunately, not all of this is hidden behind paywalls.  Thanks to those researchers who have been willing to disseminate their work through open access repositories and journals, there is now a substantial quantity of research available freely to all.

Much of this is harvested by CORE (COnnecting REpositories).  CORE’s mission is to “aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public” (About CORE).  CORE currently indexes nearly 25 million open access articles.

Because it communicates directly with repositories using a standard technology (the OAI-PMH protocol) CORE is able to access content that may be invisible to web crawlers such as Google Scholar. The use of a standard protocol also means it is able to populate its database with known fields and therefore offer an advanced search capability and refinement of results.

Try out CORE here.

CORE is also available as a free mobile app for Android and iOS.

Open access to research data

Having had your idea for a research topic, there may be some existing data that you can use to explore it further. Or maybe finding a reusable dataset will provide the inspiration for a new project?  Public funders are very keen on data sharing and will often expect researchers that they fund to reuse existing data if at all possible.

re3data.org subject wheel

re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories.  Each of the 1350 data repositories that it lists provides permanent storage and access to data.  Repositories are listed for the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, natural sciences and engineering sciences.  You can browse re3data by subject, content type (databases, audiovisual, raw data, plain text etc) or country, or search by key word.

Some useful sources listed in re3data include data.gov.uk (UK public data); Dryad (for data underpinning published work); the UK Data Archive (social sciences and humanities) and Zenodo (all subjects, used by EU funded projects for which no other suitable data repository exists).

Check out re3data.org here.

Related posts:

• Searching for open access articles
• Open access and the research lifecycle: a guide for researchers
• Open access and the research lifecycle – other posts