Alternative access

Here you will find an overview of alternative access to scientific publications. Today, almost 40% of all scientific publications are freely available (Open Access, OA) on the Internet. The following OA databases and tools (plugins for browsers) are particularly useful if a license agreement has not been concluded with the publisher.

Databases

BASE (Bielefield Academic Search Engine) is an academic search engine that indexes more than 240 million documents, 60% of which are OA accessible. The content originates from journals, institutional repositories and digital collections. BASE also searches the "deep Internet", which is ignored by commercial search engines such as Google. Search in BASE.

CORE is a non-commercial aggregator service from The Open University and Jisc that harvests and collects OA research articles from data providers, repositories and OA articles from publishers. CORE contains more than 205 million Open Access articles. Search in CORE.

Google Scholar is an academic search engine that indexes millions of research documents - "closed" as well as OA. Publisher versions are prioritised in the ranking. Via "Settings" - "Library links" you can add your own university library, so that links to full-text articles available via your own library are displayed. Search in Google Scholar.

Plugins

Many institutions worldwide ensure that OA versions of scientific articles are made publicly available in a legal way. By installing a free plugin to your browser (Chrome or Firefox), you get easy access to these articles. The following plugins are recommended:

• Unpaywall
• CORE Discovery

If there is a freely available version of the article you have found, you will see a green padlock symbol that provides a direct link to the article.

Contact your network

Contact the author(s) directly by e-mail. You can always ask about the possibility of having an article sent to you by sending an e-mail to one of the authors, which you will typically find on the article's website at the publisher's.

Most publishers allow responsible sharing of publications and sharing digital copies of one's own articles with colleagues and students if it is for private use. See example from Elsevier.