Finding OA resources

General repositories and aggregators

  • Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE). BASE is a search engine for academic web resources. BASE indexes from repositories and journals. Around 60% of content is Open Access. 
  • CARL list of Canadian Institutional Repositories. 
  • CORE. CORE is the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers from repositories and journals. CORE harvests research papers from institutional repositories, subject repositories, and open access and hybrid journals from around the world. 
  • Digital Commons Network. The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
  • OAIster Database. OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. OAIster includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors. 
  • OpenDOAR. OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. As of August 2022, 99 Canadian institutional or disciplinary repositories are listed in here. 
  • Paperity. A multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers. 
  • Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world.
  • OpenAIRE Explore.

Discipline-specific repositories and aggregators

  • agriRxiv. Preprints for agriculture and allied sciences. 
  • arXiv. Preprints in the fields of physics, mathematics, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. 
  • Commons Open Repository Exchange (CORE). Open Access for the Humanities. 
  • SocArXiv. SocArXiv is an open archive of the social sciences providing a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. 
  • PubMed Central (PMC). PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Directories and publishers

  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ contains almost 17,500 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from all countries and in all languages are accepted for indexing. 
  • Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.