Jackson Library: Open Access: Home

Open Access Browser Extensions

A browser extension is a small software module for customizing a web browser that adds additional features and functions to your browser. The two below are specifically created to help you find access to open access full text journal articles.

Open Access Button Browser Extension
Works with Chrome only. Once the button is installed, if the article is open access, you will be taken to an open access version of the article. If the article is not available through open access, you will be provided help to ask the author to freely share the article with you.
Unpaywall.org Browser Extension
Works on Chrome of Firefox only. Once installed, a lock icon will appear in the upper right side of the page when you encounter journal content. If the article is open access, the icon will change to an unlocked green button and you can click on the unlock button and access an open access version of the article. If the article is not available through open access, the icon will change to locked gray button. The article is not available through open access.

South Carolina's Virtual Library - DISCUS

If you are a South Carolina resident, you are able to access the State Library's Discus resources for free. Simply request the username and password each August from either the state library, your local public library, or email us at the library with proof of residency. These resources are a great place to access some of the paywalled information you might need in your careers and personal life after graduation. Visit the DISCUS website for more information.

Interlibrary Loan Services

If you are a current student, faculty, or staff member and are running into paywalls, please use our interlibrary loan service to get copies of those articles. (Free to You) Visit our Interlibrary Loan Article Request page.

Datasets

Census Data
data.census.gov is now the primary platform to access data and digital content from the U.S. Census Bureau, including the American Community Survey, the American Housing Survey, The Decennial Censuses (10 year surveys), Economic Census and Census Bureau surveys.
Data.gov
Data.gov is the home of the U.S. Government's open data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
NationMaster
NationMaster is a statistics database which offers a large directory of variables for comparison purposes. NationMaster simplifies the way analysts get accurate, reliable and up to date information and statistics, including market sizing and trends on 180 countries.
Occupational Outlook Handbook
The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) provides information on what workers do; the work environment; education, training, and other qualifications; pay; the job outlook; information on state and area data; similar occupations; and sources of additional information, for 324 occupational profiles, covering about 4 out of 5 jobs in the economy.
Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. They conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. They do not take policy positions.

eBooks

Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
InTech Open Books
InTechOpen Books has more than 5,800 peer-reviewed Open Access books covering physical sciences, engineering and technology, life sciences, and health sciences.
LibriVox
Free public domain audiobooks.
National Academies Press
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the publications of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. NAP publishes more than 200 publications per year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently researched information on important matters in science and health policy.
NCBI Bookshelf
Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
Open Library
Open Library is a universal catalog for book metadata. Open Library opens the doors to the places where you can find the book you’re looking for.
Palace Bookshelf
The Palace Bookshelf is a collection of more than 11,000 ebooks that are free to download, no log in or registration required. The collection includes classics, children's books, textbooks, foreign language titles, and more.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

Journals

African Journals OnLine
African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is the world's largest and preeminent platform of African-published scholarly journals. AJOL is a Non-Profit Organisation that (since 1998) works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global "biodiversity community."
BMC, Bio Medical Central
BMC has an evolving portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, sharing discoveries from research communities in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
ClincalTrails.gov
ClinicalTrials.gov is a Web-based resource that provides patients, their family members, health care professionals, researchers, and the public with easy access to information on publicly and privately supported clinical studies on a wide range of diseases and conditions. The Web site is maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Congress.gov
Congress.gov is the official website for U.S. federal legislative information. The site provides access to accurate, timely, and complete legislative information for Members of Congress, legislative agencies, and the public.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
govinfo
govinfo is a service of the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO), which is a Federal agency in the legislative branch.
govinfo provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
IntechOpen Journals
IntechOpen Journals are a new publishing venue for academics in areas of rapid interdisciplinary growth at the cutting edge of technology, environmental sciences and human health.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Internet Archives Scholar
This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
PubChem
PubChem is an open chemistry database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubChem mostly contains small molecules, but also larger molecules such as nucleotides, carbohydrates, lipids, peptides, and chemically-modified macromolecules.
Public Library of Science
PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
PubMed Central
PubMed® comprises more than 34 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Science.gov
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results.

Image Collections

Creative Commons Search - OpenVerse
Open Verse allows you to browse over 600 million items to reuse that is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.
Digital Public Library of America
Discover images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States harvested from libraries and cultural organizations from across the United States.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
These digital collections contain millions of items such as photos, maps, books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more from the Library of Congress.
Luna Imaging - Luna Commons
Browse through all of public LUNA collections which includes digital collections from libraries, museums and universities.
National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
NLM’s Digital Collections allow searching and browsing numerous document collections: Images from the History of Medicine, World War 1, Medicine in the Americas 1610-1920, and many more.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
The New York Public Library's digital collections is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more that come from the New York Public Library.
Open Access at the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in our permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.

Open Access: Home

What is Open Access?