Science, Technology, and Society
A guide for research support for STS classes!
"Free" Research Papers and Articles
One question that we receive frequently is what folks will have access to after graduation. And the answer is that the resources provided to alumni is limited - this page for Alumni Services provides details about services and resources offered specifically to alumni.
Working off this post, as a starting point, the list below is a curated collection of resources designed to outline a variety of tools and resources freely available to help in locate relevant materials. The original list, while containing 40 websites, encompasses a wide range of resource types. To help you navigate and understand these diverse materials better, we've categorized them based on their primary functions and content. By grouping these resources, our aim is to enable you to identify and access the most suitable materials for your specific research needs effectively.
Feel free to explore the carefully arranged categories and uncover a wealth of platforms, tools, and websites that will enhance your research process if you're working without access to the UVA Library's resources.
Open Access
Open access is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data. A publication is defined 'open access' when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it - that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements.
Learn More:
Library Included Open Access Resources
- Directory of Open Access Books This link opens in a new windowThe Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for open access books. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open access license, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
- Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new windowFind open access journals & articles.
- EDP Open This link opens in a new windowEDP Open is the Open Access arm of EDP Sciences, previously Editions de Physique. EDP Open provides access to OA journals and books, as well as free content made available from the main EDP Sciences platform.
- LLMC Digital Open Access This link opens in a new windowLLMC Digital is a collection of digitized historic legal material and government documents. It includes publications of state, federal, and territorial governments of the United States, as well as publications of the governments of Canada, Great Britain, Germany, and many other countries. It also includes Indigenous Law, international law, and multi-jurisdictional special focus collections.
- Open Knowledge Repository (World Bank) This link opens in a new windowThe World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. Through the OKR, The World Bank collects, disseminates, and permanently preserves its intellectual output in digital form.
- PLoS: Public Library of Science This link opens in a new windowPLoS publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals, including PLoS ONE, which publishes all rigorous science across the full range of life and health sciences; the community journals (PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases); and flagship journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology. The journals are editorially independent, and highly selective journals publishing fewer than 10% of submissions along with a range of informative and influential non-research content.
Other Open Access Search Engines
- arXiv“arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.”
Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics - BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search EngineBASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
- Cambridge Open EngageCambridge Open Engage is the early and open content platform from Cambridge University Press, providing the space and resources for researchers to connect, collaborate, and rapidly disseminate early and open research in various formats.
- CORE (COnnecting REpositories)“CORE (COnnecting REpositories) provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature, collecting and indexing research from repositories and journals. It is, to our knowledge, also the world’s largest collection of full text open access research papers.
- OATD (Open Access Theses & Dissertations)OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 7,393,846 theses and dissertations.
- STORI think this refers to JSTOR and ArtSTOR - https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/
In addition to JSTOR, which includes paywalled materials, they also do work to create searchable open access and generally open collections as well. - SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online"Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) SA is South Africa’s premier open-access (free to access and free to publish) searchable full-text journal database in service of the South African research community."
Major Academic Publishers... that also offer OA journals
- Nature CommunicationsNature Communications is an open access, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. Papers published by the journal aim to represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.
- EBSCO Open DissertationsEBSCO Open Dissertations extends the work started in 2014, when EBSCO and the H.W. Wilson Foundation created American Doctoral Dissertations which contained indexing from the H.W. Wilson print publication, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities, 1933-1955. In 2015, the H.W. Wilson Foundation agreed to support the expansion of the scope of the American Doctoral Dissertations database to include records for dissertations and theses from 1955 to the present.
- SpringerOpenThe SpringerOpen portfolio has grown tremendously since its launch in 2010, so that we now offer researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals. Publishing with SpringerOpen makes your work freely available online for everyone, immediately upon publication, and our high-level peer-review and production processes guarantee the quality and reliability of the work. Open access books are published by our Springer imprint.
Pre-Prints
Preprints are defined as “a scholarly manuscript posted by the author(s) in an openly accessible platform, usually before or in parallel with the peer review process” (Committee on Publication Ethics [COPE], 2018). They are a version of a scientific paper uploaded by the authors to a public server before being submitted to a journal (though not all preprints are published as journal articles).
- Social Sciences Research NetworkSSRN provides 1,555,983 preprints and research papers from 2,090,311 researchers in over 65 disciplines.
- Open Science Framework (OSF)Open Science Framework (OSF) - Store data, code, and other materials in OSF Storage, or connect another third-party account. Research teams may work on projects privately or make projects publicly accessible. Individual files must be 5GB or less to be uploaded to OSF Storage. Larger files can be stored in an add-on.
- bioRxivAn open access preprint repository for the biological sciences co-founded by John Inglis and Richard Sever in November 2013. It is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- medRxivAn online disciplinary repository publishing preprints in all disciplines of the health sciences.
- PsyArXivA preprint repository for the psychological sciences opened in September 2016 and officially launched in December 2016. It is hosted by the Center for Open Science.
- PhilPapersPhilPapers is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers.
- HAL ArchivesAn open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields. While it is primarily directed towards French academics, participation is not restricted to them.
- RedalycBibliographic database and digital library of open access journals; overseen by Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
Non-Profit Search Engines
- OpenAIRE ExploreA non-profit organization with a mission to promote open scholarship and improve discoverability, accessibility, shareability, reusability, reproducibility, and monitoring of data-driven research results, globally. The organization operates a European e-infrastructure offering a diverse set of public services to accelerate the adoption of Open Science and is supported by a network of experts placed in key national organizations across European countries.
- Archive.org – The Internet ArchiveThe Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 28+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 1,200+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages. - Internet Archive (Scholar Section)This full-text search index includes over 35 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 preprints crawled from the World Wide Web.
- Digital Commons NetworkThe Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, this dynamic research tool includes peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Federally Funded Search Engine
- ERIC (U.S. Department of Education) This link opens in a new windowERIC provides access to more than 1.4 million bibliographic records of journal articles, most of which are peer-reviewed, and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added multiple times per week. If available, links to full text are included.
- PubMed Central This link opens in a new windowThe U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
API available, more information here: APIs for Scholarly Research
For Profit Search Engines
- Semantic scholarA search engine of “200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.”
Research Tools
- Unpaywall**Browser Extension**
"We harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use." - PaperPanda"PaperPanda is a Chrome extension that uses some clever logic and the Panda’s detective skills to find you the research paper PDFs you need. Essentially, when you activate PaperPanda it finds the DOI of the paper from the current page, and then goes and searches for it. It starts by querying various Open Access repositories like OpenAccessButton, OaDoi, SemanticScholar, Core, ArXiV, and the Internet Archive. "
- Citationsy**Bibliographic Manager**
A web-based tool that helps you create citations, reference lists and bibliographies.