Finding Open Access Articles in Google Scholar

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The importance of Open Access (OA) has been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a need to make information freely available–fast.  One result of this has been that many publishers have made coronavirus-related publications (and, often, most of their content) freely available. Unfortunately, the discovery process for open access articles isn’t necessarily the same as subscription searching. Especially if you do not have access to specific subscription databases.

Digital Scholarship Services recently created a Searching for Open Access Articles research guide, which provides several tips for finding open access works in Fondren’s OneSearch, general search engines, and with browser plugins. Rather than repeat that information here, we’ll dig a bit deeper into using Google Scholar to find openly available versions of articles and other works.

With an increase in institutional and funder open access policies and disciplinary use of pre-print servers, one can often find a freely available version of an article via Google Scholar. Many institutional and pre-print repositories are indexed by Google Scholar, making their contents discoverable. Often, Google Scholar will “match” these versions of works with a published item, if available (like a journal article).

If you don’t have access to the full text of an article that you find in Google Scholar, here are a few ways you may be able to find a free version:

  1. Look for [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list. When you see one of these options, just click on it to get the full text. If you are on campus or logged into Google Scholar with your institutional email, the links will often be for subscription content, if available.
  2. If you don’t see [DOC], [PDF] or [HTML] on the result list, look for All versions–there may be a free full text version.
  3. If you still haven’t found the full text, look for Related articles under your article to see if articles on the same topic are available full text.

Google Scholar Search Results

 

 

This post adapted content from Ashley Farley’s “Finding Open Access Articles–Tools & Tips,” licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License and COM Library’s “Open Access Journals and Databases: Google Scholar,” licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.