Finding Open Access Materials 

There are many reasons why you might wish to search for open access materials specifically. 

• IU Libraries may not provide access to the journal. 
• You may want to share the article with others outside the IU ecosystem. 
• You might be in search of papers, data, or other resources for reuse and collaboration and wish to find works with open licenses.

This post will examine a couple of tools to help you find OA materials. 

LibKey Nomad 

LibKeyNomad is a browser plugin that will return either OA versions of a work or help you gain access to IU-subscribed resources, depending on which is available for the particular work. The plugin will ask you to select your institution in order to make use of UITS proxies (which will require you to sign in with your IU single sign-on account). 

When a work is beyond a paywall, LibKey Nomad will pop up a button in the corner of the screen for you to select. 

LibKey Nomad works using a work’s DOI, and so it’s primarily focused on providing access to journal articles. Tools like LibKey Nomad underscore the importance of including the version of record’s DOI whenever you self-archive OA versions of your own scholarly work! 

Unpaywall 

Unpaywall is a browser plugin similar to LibKey Nomad with a focus on free and OA versions of articles. Because of this limited scope, you don’t need an IU affiliation to make full use of Unpaywall. 

Unpaywall also uses DOIs to associate articles with their green OA counterparts. When it finds one, it pops up a tab on the side of the screen with the OA link. 

Other Sources 

If these tools fail to find a copy of the article, there are a few places you can turn. 

• IU Library’s OneSearch does index OA articles and ebooks in addition to works purchased by IU, and the same is true for the library’s Online Journals, Ebooks, and More search.
• Authors based at universities will often self-archive using their institution’s repository, like Indiana’s own IUScholarWorks, and Core provides a search across a federated group of repositories, which can return OA works beyond journal articles.
• Many authors self-archive in various subject-specific preprint archives. There are far too many to list here, but there’s likely to be at least one popular choice in your field.  
• PudMed will link to OA versions of articles. 

Beyond Articles

Scholarly work beyond articles are also made open access. One of the largest developing areas is research data. Unfortunately there’s no single tool for finding open data, but IU’s Research Data Commons maintains a short list of publicly available data repositories. Additionally, IU’s Research Data Services is willing to consult with project leads who are looking for open data. 

Open Access Week (October 20 – 24) is an annual opportunity to learn and raise awareness about Open Access: free, immediate, online access to scholarly research and the right to use and re-use that research as needed. Click here to see the list of events at IU. 

About the author: Elizabeth-Marie Helms is a graduate student in Library Science and the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. A former middle school history teacher, she now studies the public understanding of science and works as an assistant in Scholarly Communications for IU Libraries.