A super quick minuscule guide to open access materials

[themediaevalmonk]

So, due to the stronghold academic publishers have on academic articles and other books, more and more scholars are publishing their books and articles as open access. This means that the materials are freely available for everyone to read. Unfortunately, not all universities require their researchers to do so, but more and more are.

It's expensive for researchers and universities to publish open access, so as someone who no longer has access to university library materials, I'm grateful for them doing it!

Here is the University of Exeter's guide to open access (this is for scholars wanting to publish but can be useful to understand how the academic publishing world works): https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/openresearch/oa/paidoa/

Many universities will have an open databases for their scholars to publish. The works there will usually be formatted in a way that might not be 100% aesthetically pleasing as they are pre-publication. (Publishers will do the fancy formatting.) Here is the University of Exeter's open access research platform as an example: https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/

Here is a database of open access journals: https://doaj.org

I hope you find this helpful for your research!