Happy International Open Access Week! Fondren Library’s Digital Scholarship Services is celebrating by highlighting the library’s  support for open access (OA). The library supports OA in a number of ways, including:

• Financial support for OA publishing: Fondren Library supports Rice authors publishing in Open Access (OA), peer-reviewed research journals through membership discounts and through offering funds for OA fees. We also support OA scholarly book publication by Rice authors. Information about the program can be found in this research guide.
• Rice Open Access Policy: This policy, which was passed by the Faculty Senate in 2012, directs faculty to make copies of journal articles available in the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive. Learn more here.
• Rice Digital Scholarship Archive: This repository enables faculty to share their work openly; librarians manage the content to ensure that it can be found and is preserved. Most materials come from Rice faculty members’ research, electronic theses and dissertations, and digitized collections of rare or unique books, images, musical performances, and manuscripts. Use this webform to submit your work.
• Open Educational Resources: As part of its support for affordable course material, Fondren provides resources for finding and using Open Educational Resources (OER).

If you have questions or want to learn more about the library’s OA initiatives, please contact openaccess@rice.edu.

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.

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.