Research articles, preprints and postprints

Your first port of call for information (and sometimes the full text) of research papers and articles will be a database. However these may also be available in Open Access archives or repositories.

Open Access archives or repositories are digital collections of research articles that have been placed there by their authors. In the case of journal articles this may be done either before (preprints) or after publication (postprints).

Open access archives or repositories can contain a variety of content types and formats, for example research outputs such as scholarly articles and preprints, reports, theses, audio, video, images and other material.

Access to the contents of these repositories may be via Google or via one of the specialised search services for a more focused search. Open Access repositories may be multidisciplinary and located in universities or other research-based institutions, or they may be centralised and subject-based, such as the one covering certain areas of physics and related disciplines, called arXiv.

The Institutional Repository at Heriot-Watt University is called ROS (Research Outputs service), it's objectives are:

To create global visibility for the University's scholarly research.
To provide open access to the University's research output.
To store and preserve other related digital assets.
To collect content in a single location, in order to better manage the University's research output.

More information on Open Access is available from the JISC Open Access briefing paper

Directories of Open Access Repositories

OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
This registry has two functions: (1) to monitor overall growth in the number and size of eprint repositories and (2) to maintain a record of repository software usage.

Searching Open Access Repositories

Repository Search
Search across 103 UK academic eprints repositories.

OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. OpenDOAR has a trial search service for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory.

Google
Google and other internet search engines index the material held in open access repositories.

Open access journals

Access to the majority of journals is via a subscription (the publisher or provider will charge for access to the journal in print or electronic format). A list of the titles the University Library subscribes to is available from the A-Z list of journals.

Open Access journals are journals whose articles may be accessed online by anyone without charge. In many cases they may also be published in print. Some, mainly those published from a university department or with substantial subsidy, make no author or page charges. Others levy a charge for publishing an article, turning on its head the traditional model where a library pays for access to the contents of a journal through a subscription; in most cases this is financed by a research grant or institutional funds.

More information on Open Access is available from the JISC Open Access briefing paper.

List of Open Access Journals

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
Maintained by LUND University Libraries, this service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals and aims to cover all subjects and languages. There are 4570+ journals in the directory.

More information on Open Access is available from the JISC Open Access briefing paper.