How to find Open Access publications?

Journal article, anthology article, research report, or entire book – any type of publication can be Open Access.

And just as colourful as the types of publications are the places where they can be stored: from the personal homepages of scientists to the document servers of universities or institutions to the websites of publishers to platforms for journals and books of all disciplines.

In KatalogPlus contains many Open Access publications, but still only a fraction of all publications worldwide. To increase your chances of finding what you are looking for, it is worthwhile to search in special directories as well.

A good starting point is, for example, the BASE search engine. It has an index of over 340 million documents from around 11,100 sources (as of August 2023) – document servers, journal directories, eBook directories – and thus enables a relatively comprehensive search of freely available literature.

If you are specifically interested in Open Access journals and journal articles, use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This directory currently lists over 19,770 journals and over 9 million articles.

Paperity is a multidisciplinary full-text database for articles of Open Access journals. So far, the database includes about 10,1 million articles from more than 17,100 journals. Like BASE, Paperity offers a simple and an advanced search.

Portals such as the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) or the OAPEN Library ("Open Access Publishing in European Networks") collect Open Access ebooks.

The OpenDOAR directory collects publications from numerous university document servers worldwide.

In some databases, you can set a filter for Open Access publications. For the search in EconBiz, for example, this is the option "Open Access only". In the PubMed search engine, the search filter is "free full text". And the database Web of Science offers an additional search filter "Open Access".

These options can be used to find Open Access journals that may be suitable for your own next Open Access article.