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ScienceOpen provides researchers with a wide range of tools to support their research – all for free. Here is a short checklist to make sure you are getting the most of the technological infrastructure and content that we have to offer. What can a researcher do on ScienceOpen? Continue reading “What can a Researcher do on ScienceOpen?”

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Research provides the foundation of modern society. Research leads to breakthroughs, and communicating the results of research is what allows us to turn breakthroughs into better lives—to provide new treatments for disease, to implement solutions for challenges like global warming, and to build entire industries around what were once just ideas.

However, our current system for communicating research is crippled by a centuries old model that hasn’t been updated to take advantage of 21st century technology:

Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.

Our current system for communicating research uses a print-based model in the digital age. Even though research is largely produced with public dollars by researchers who share it freely, the results are hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers. These artificial barriers are maintained by legacy publishers and restrict access to a small fraction of users, locking out most of the world’s population and preventing the use of new research techniques.

This fundamental mismatch between what is possible with digital technology—an open system for communicating research results in which anyone, anywhere can contribute—and our outdated publishing system has led to the call for Open Access.

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research.

Funders invest in research to advance human knowledge and ultimately improve lives. Open Access increases the return on that investment by ensuring the results of the research they fund can be read and built on by anyone.

Breakthroughs often come from unexpected places ; the Theory of Relativity was developed by a patent clerk. Open Access expands the number of potential contributors to research from just those at institutions wealthy enough to afford journal subscriptions to anyone with an internet connection.

Researchers benefit from having the widest possible audience. Researchers provide their articles to publishers for free, because their compensation comes in the form of recognition for their findings. Open Access means more readers, more potential collaborators, more citations for their work, and ultimately more recognition.

The research enterprise itself benefits when the latest techniques can be easily used. For years, we have had powerful text and data mining tools that can analyze the entire research literature, uncovering trends and connections that no human reader could. While publishers’ technical and legal barriers currently prevent their widespread use, Open Access empowers anyone to use these tools, which hold the potential of revolutionizing how research is conducted.

Even the best ideas remain just that until they are shared, until they can be utilized by others. The more people that can access and build upon the latest research, the more valuable that research becomes and the more likely we are to benefit as a society. More eyes make for smaller problems.

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Open Access Impact Stories

The impact of embracing community over commercialization.

To catalyze discussion around the 2023 International Open Access Week theme of “Community over...

Zenodo’s Open Repository Streamlines Sharing Science

A decade ago, the scientific community recognized that to move from open access to open science,...

African Open Access Textbook and Journal Publishing Gains...

The high cost of college textbooks and scholarly journals puts many students and institutions at a...

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21 Legit Research Databases for Free Journal Articles in 2024

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Written by Scribendi

Has this ever happened to you? While looking for websites for research, you come across a research paper site that claims to connect academics to a peer-reviewed article database for free.

Intrigued, you search for keywords related to your topic, only to discover that you must pay a hefty subscription fee to access the service. After the umpteenth time being duped, you begin to wonder if there's even such a thing as free journal articles.

Subscription fees and paywalls are often the bane of students and academics, especially those at small institutions who don't provide access to many free article directories and repositories.

Whether you're working on an undergraduate paper, a PhD dissertation, or a medical research study, we want to help you find tools to locate and access the information you need to produce well-researched, compelling, and innovative work.

Below, we discuss why peer-reviewed articles are superior and list out the best free article databases to use in 2024.

Download Our Free Research Database Roundup PDF

Why peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are more authoritative.

Determining what sources are reliable can be challenging. Peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are the gold standard in academic research. Reputable academic journals have a rigorous peer-review process.

The peer review process provides accountability to the academic community, as well as to the content of the article. The peer review process involves qualified experts in a specific (often very specific) field performing a review of an article's methods and findings to determine things like quality and credibility.

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in peer-reviewed article databases and research databases, and if you know that a database of journals is reliable, that can offer reassurances about the reliability of a free article. Peer review is often double blind, meaning that the author removes all identifying information and, likewise, does not know the identity of the reviewers. This helps reviewers maintain objectivity and impartiality so as to judge an article based on its merit.

Where to Find Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in a variety of research databases. Below is a list of some of the major databases you can use to find peer-reviewed articles and other sources in disciplines spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

What Are Open Access Journals?

An open access (OA) journal is a journal whose content can be accessed without payment. This provides scholars, students, and researchers with free journal articles. OA journals use alternate methods of funding to cover publication costs so that articles can be published without having to pass those publication costs on to the reader.

Some of these funding models include standard funding methods like advertising, public funding, and author payment models, where the author pays a fee in order to publish in the journal. There are OA journals that have non-peer-reviewed academic content, as well as journals that focus on dissertations, theses, and papers from conferences, but the main focus of OA is peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.

The internet has certainly made it easier to access research articles and other scholarly publications without needing access to a university library, and OA takes another step in that direction by removing financial barriers to academic content.

Choosing Wisely

Features of legitimate oa journals.

There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal is legitimate:

Mission statement —The mission statement for an OA journal should be available on their website.

Publication history —Is the journal well established? How long has it been available?

Editorial board —Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are their credentials?

Indexing —Can the journal be found in a reliable database?

Peer review —What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?

Impact factor —What is the average number of times the journal is cited over a two-year period?

Features of Illegitimate OA Journals

There are predatory publications that take advantage of the OA format, and they are something to be wary of. Here are some things to look out for:

Contact information —Is contact information provided? Can it be verified?

Turnaround —If the journal makes dubious claims about the amount of time from submission to publication, it is likely unreliable.

Editorial board —Much like determining legitimacy, looking at the editorial board and their credentials can help determine illegitimacy.

Indexing —Can the journal be found in any scholarly databases?

Peer review —Is there a statement about the peer review process? Does it fit what you know about peer review?

How to Find Scholarly Articles

Identify keywords.

Keywords are included in an article by the author. Keywords are an excellent way to find content relevant to your research topic or area of interest. In academic searches, much like you would on a search engine, you can use keywords to navigate through what is available to find exactly what you're looking for.

Authors provide keywords that will help you easily find their article when researching a related topic, often including general terms to accommodate broader searches, as well as some more specific terms for those with a narrower scope. Keywords can be used individually or in combination to refine your scholarly article search.

Narrow Down Results

Sometimes, search results can be overwhelming, and searching for free articles on a journal database is no exception, but there are multiple ways to narrow down your results. A good place to start is discipline.

What category does your topic fall into (psychology, architecture, machine learning, etc.)? You can also narrow down your search with a year range if you're looking for articles that are more recent.

A Boolean search can be incredibly helpful. This entails including terms like AND between two keywords in your search if you need both keywords to be in your results (or, if you are looking to exclude certain keywords, to exclude these words from the results).

Consider Different Avenues

If you're not having luck using keywords in your search for free articles, you may still be able to find what you're looking for by changing your tactics. Casting a wider net sometimes yields positive results, so it may be helpful to try searching by subject if keywords aren't getting you anywhere.

You can search for a specific publisher to see if they have OA publications in the academic journal database. And, if you know more precisely what you're looking for, you can search for the title of the article or the author's name.

Determining the Credibility of Scholarly Sources

Ensuring that sources are both credible and reliable is crucial to academic research. Use these strategies to help evaluate the usefulness of scholarly sources:

Peer Review : Look for articles that have undergone a rigorous peer-review process. Peer-reviewed articles are typically vetted by experts in the field, ensuring the accuracy of the research findings.

Tip: To determine whether an article has undergone rigorous peer review, review the journal's editorial policies, which are often available on the journal's website. Look for information about the peer-review process, including the criteria for selecting reviewers, the process for handling conflicts of interest, and any transparency measures in place.

Publisher Reputation : Consider the reputation of the publisher. Established publishers, such as well-known academic journals, are more likely to adhere to high editorial standards and publishing ethics.
Author Credentials : Evaluate the credentials and expertise of the authors. Check their affiliations, academic credentials, and past publications to assess their authority in the field.
Citations and References : Examine the citations and references provided in the article. A well-researched article will cite credible sources to support its arguments and findings. Verify the accuracy of the cited sources and ensure they are from reputable sources.
Publication Date : Consider the publication date of the article. While older articles may still be relevant, particularly in certain fields, it is best to prioritize recent publications for up-to-date research and findings.
Journal Impact Factor : Assess the journal's impact factor or other metrics that indicate its influence and reputation within the academic community. Higher impact factor journals are generally considered more prestigious and reliable.

Tip: Journal Citation Reports (JCR), produced by Clarivate Analytics, is a widely used source for impact factor data. You can access JCR through academic libraries or directly from the Clarivate Analytics website if you have a subscription.

Peer Recommendations : Seek recommendations from peers, mentors, or professors in your field. They can provide valuable insights and guidance on reputable sources and journals within your area of study.
Cross-Verification : Cross-verify the information presented in the article with other credible sources. Compare findings, methodologies, and conclusions with similar studies to ensure consistency and reliability.

By employing these strategies, researchers can confidently evaluate the credibility and reliability of scholarly sources, ensuring the integrity of their research contributions in an ever-evolving landscape.

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases

Navigating OA journals, research article databases, and academic websites trying to find high-quality sources for your research can really make your head spin. What constitutes a reliable database? What is a useful resource for your discipline and research topic? How can you find and access full-text, peer-reviewed articles?

Fortunately, we're here to help. Having covered some of the ins and outs of peer review, OA journals, and how to search for articles, we have compiled a list of the top 21 free online journals and the best research databases. This list of databases is a great resource to help you navigate the wide world of academic research.

These databases provide a variety of free sources, from abstracts and citations to full-text, peer-reviewed OA journals. With databases covering specific areas of research and interdisciplinary databases that provide a variety of material, these are some of our favorite free databases, and they're totally legit!

CORE is a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA research. CORE has the largest collection of OA articles available. It allows users to search more than 219 million OA articles. While most of these link to the full-text article on the original publisher's site, or to a PDF available for download, five million records are hosted directly on CORE.

CORE's mission statement is a simple and straightforward commitment to offering OA articles to anyone, anywhere in the world. They also host communities that are available for researchers to join and an ambassador community to enhance their services globally. In addition to a straightforward keyword search, CORE offers advanced search options to filter results by publication type, year, language, journal, repository, and author.

CORE's user interface is easy to use and navigate. Search results can be sorted based on relevance or recency, and you can search for relevant content directly from the results screen.

Collection : 219,537,133 OA articles

Other Services : Additional services are available from CORE, with extras that are geared toward researchers, repositories, and businesses. There are tools for accessing raw data, including an API that provides direct access to data, datasets that are available for download, and FastSync for syncing data content from the CORE database.

CORE has a recommender plug-in that suggests relevant OA content in the database while conducting a search and a discovery feature that helps you discover OA versions of paywalled articles. Other features include tools for managing content, such as a dashboard for managing repository output and the Repository Edition service to enhance discoverability.

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles : Yes

Advanced Search Options : Language, author, journal, publisher, repository, DOI, year

2. ScienceOpen

Functioning as a research and publishing network, ScienceOpen offers OA to more than 74 million articles in all areas of science. Although you do need to register to view the full text of articles, registration is free. The advanced search function is highly detailed, allowing you to find exactly the research you're looking for.

The Berlin- and Boston-based company was founded in 2013 to "facilitate open and public communications between academics and to allow ideas to be judged on their merit, regardless of where they come from." Search results can be exported for easy integration with reference management systems.

You can also bookmark articles for later research. There are extensive networking options, including your Science Open profile, a forum for interacting with other researchers, the ability to track your usage and citations, and an interactive bibliography. Users have the ability to review articles and provide their knowledge and insight within the community.

Collection : 74,560,631

Other Services : None

Advanced Search Options : Content type, source, author, journal, discipline

3. Directory of Open Access Journals

A multidisciplinary, community-curated directory, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives researchers access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals. It has archived more than two million articles from 17,193 journals, allowing you to either browse by subject or search by keyword.

The site was launched in 2003 with the aim of increasing the visibility of OA scholarly journals online. Content on the site covers subjects from science, to law, to fine arts, and everything in between. DOAJ has a commitment to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, OA scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."

Information about the journal is available with each search result. Abstracts are also available in a collapsible format directly from the search screen. The scholarly article website is somewhat simple, but it is easy to navigate. There are 16 principles of transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing that clearly outline DOAJ policies and standards.

Collection : 6,817,242

Advanced Search Options : Subject, journal, year

4. Education Resources Information Center

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) of the Institution of Education Sciences allows you to search by topic for material related to the field of education. Links lead to other sites, where you may have to purchase the information, but you can search for full-text articles only. You can also search only peer-reviewed sources.

The service primarily indexes journals, gray literature (such as technical reports, white papers, and government documents), and books. All sources of material on ERIC go through a formal review process prior to being indexed. ERIC's selection policy is available as a PDF on their website.

The ERIC website has an extensive FAQ section to address user questions. This includes categories like general questions, peer review, and ERIC content. There are also tips for advanced searches, as well as general guidance on the best way to search the database. ERIC is an excellent database for content specific to education.

Collection : 1,292,897

Advanced Search Options : Boolean

5. arXiv e-Print Archive

The arXiv e-Print Archive is run by Cornell University Library and curated by volunteer moderators, and it now offers OA to more than one million e-prints.

There are advisory committees for all eight subjects available on the database. With a stated commitment to an "emphasis on openness, collaboration, and scholarship," the arXiv e-Print Archive is an excellent STEM resource.

The interface is not as user-friendly as some of the other databases available, and the website hosts a blog to provide news and updates, but it is otherwise a straightforward math and science resource. There are simple and advanced search options, and, in addition to conducting searches for specific topics and articles, users can browse content by subject. The arXiv e-Print Archive clearly states that they do not peer review the e-prints in the database.

Collection : 1,983,891

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles : No

Advanced Search Options : Subject, date, title, author, abstract, DOI

6. Social Science Research Network

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a collection of papers from the social sciences community. It is a highly interdisciplinary platform used to search for scholarly articles related to 67 social science topics. SSRN has a variety of research networks for the various topics available through the free scholarly database.

The site offers more than 700,000 abstracts and more than 600,000 full-text papers. There is not yet a specific option to search for only full-text articles, but, because most of the papers on the site are free access, it's not often that you encounter a paywall. There is currently no option to search for only peer-reviewed articles.

You must become a member to use the services, but registration is free and enables you to interact with other scholars around the world. SSRN is "passionately committed to increasing inclusion, diversity and equity in scholarly research," and they encourage and discuss the use of inclusive language in scholarship whenever possible.

Collection : 1,058,739 abstracts; 915,452 articles

Advanced Search Options : Term, author, date, network

7. Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a big player in the world of OA science. Publishing 12 OA journals, the nonprofit organization is committed to facilitating openness in academic research. According to the site, "all PLOS content is at the highest possible level of OA, meaning that scientific articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere."

PLOS outlines four fundamental goals that guide the organization: break boundaries, empower researchers, redefine quality, and open science. All PLOS journals are peer-reviewed, and all 12 journals uphold rigorous ethical standards for research, publication, and scientific reporting.

PLOS does not offer advanced search options. Content is organized by topic into research communities that users can browse through, in addition to options to search for both articles and journals. The PLOS website also has resources for peer reviewers, including guidance on becoming a reviewer and on how to best participate in the peer review process.

Collection : 12 journals

Advanced Search Options : None

8. OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR, or the Directory of Open Access Repositories, is a comprehensive resource for finding free OA journals and articles. Using Google Custom Search, OpenDOAR combs through OA repositories around the world and returns relevant research in all disciplines.

The repositories it searches through are assessed and categorized by OpenDOAR staff to ensure they meet quality standards. Inclusion criteria for the database include requirements for OA content, global access, and categorically appropriate content, in addition to various other quality assurance measures. OpenDOAR has metadata, data, content, preservation, and submission policies for repositories, in addition to two OA policy statements regarding minimum and optimum recommendations.

This database allows users to browse and search repositories, which can then be selected, and articles and data can be accessed from the repository directly. As a repository database, much of the content on the site is geared toward the support of repositories and OA standards.

Collection : 5,768 repositories

Other Services : OpenDOAR offers a variety of additional services. Given the nature of the platform, services are primarily aimed at repositories and institutions, and there is a marked focus on OA in general. Sherpa services are OA archiving tools for authors and institutions.

They also offer various resources for OA support and compliance regarding standards and policies. The publication router matches publications and publishers with appropriate repositories.

There are also services and resources from JISC for repositories for cost management, discoverability, research impact, and interoperability, including ORCID consortium membership information. Additionally, a repository self-assessment tool is available for members.

Advanced Search Options : Name, organization name, repository type, software name, content type, subject, country, region

9. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is operated by the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, and it offers more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 sources. Sixty percent of its content is OA, and you can filter your search accordingly.

BASE has rigorous inclusion requirements for content providers regarding quality and relevance, and they maintain a list of content providers for the sake of transparency, which can be easily found on their website. BASE has a fairly elegant interface. Search results can be organized by author, title, or date.

From the search results, items can be selected and exported, added to favorites, emailed, and searched in Google Scholar. There are basic and advanced search features, with the advanced search offering numerous options for refining search criteria. There is also a feature on the website that saves recent searches without additional steps from the user.

Collection : 276,019,066 documents; 9,286 content providers

Advanced Search Options : Author, subject, year, content provider, language, document type, access, terms of reuse

10. Digital Library of the Commons Repository

Run by Indiana University, the Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) Repository is a multidisciplinary journal repository that allows users to access thousands of free and OA articles from around the world. You can browse by document type, date, author, title, and more or search for keywords relevant to your topic.

DCL also offers the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons, an image database, and a keyword thesaurus for enhanced search parameters. The repository includes books, book chapters, conference papers, journal articles, surveys, theses and dissertations, and working papers. DCL advanced search features drop-down menus of search types with built-in Boolean search options.

Searches can be sorted by relevance, title, date, or submission date in ascending or descending order. Abstracts are included in selected search results, with access to full texts available, and citations can be exported from the same page. Additionally, the image database search includes tips for better search results.

Collection : 10,784

Advanced Search Options : Author, date, title, subject, sector, region, conference

11. CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook is a little different from the other resources on this list in that it is not an online journal directory or repository. It is, however, a useful free online research database for academics in a variety of disciplines.

All the information is free to access, and it provides facts about every country in the world, which are organized by category and include information about history, geography, transportation, and much more. The World Factbook can be searched by country or region, and there is also information about the world's oceans.

This site contains resources related to the CIA as an organization rather than being a scientific journal database specifically. The site has a user interface that is easy to navigate. The site also provides a section for updates regarding changes to what information is available and how it is organized, making it easier to interact with the information you are searching for.

Collection : 266 countries

12. Paperity

Paperity boasts its status as the "first multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers." Their focus is on helping you avoid paywalls while connecting you to authoritative research. In addition to providing readers with easy access to thousands of journals, Paperity seeks to help authors reach their audiences and help journals increase their exposure to boost readership.

Paperity has journal articles for every discipline, and the database offers more than a dozen advanced search options, including the length of the paper and the number of authors. There is even an option to include, exclude, or exclusively search gray papers.

Paperity is available for mobile, with both a mobile site and the Paperity Reader, an app that is available for both Android and Apple users. The database is also available on social media. You can interact with Paperity via Twitter and Facebook, and links to their social media are available on their homepage, including their Twitter feed.

Collection : 8,837,396

Advanced Search Options : Title, abstract, journal title, journal ISSN, publisher, year of publication, number of characters, number of authors, DOI, author, affiliation, language, country, region, continent, gray papers

13. dblp Computer Science Bibliography

The dblp Computer Science Bibliography is an online index of major computer science publications. dblp was founded in 1993, though until 2010 it was a university-specific database at the University of Trier in Germany. It is currently maintained by the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics.

Although it provides access to both OA articles and those behind a paywall, you can limit your search to only OA articles. The site indexes more than three million publications, making it an invaluable resource in the world of computer science. dblp entries are color-coded based on the type of item.

dblp has an extensive FAQ section, so questions that might arise about topics like the database itself, navigating the website, or the data on dblp, in addition to several other topics, are likely to be answered. The website also hosts a blog and has a section devoted to website statistics.

Collection : 5,884,702

14. EconBiz

EconBiz is a great resource for economic and business studies. A service of the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, it offers access to full texts online, with the option of searching for OA material only. Their literature search is performed across multiple international databases.

EconBiz has an incredibly useful research skills section, with resources such as Guided Walk, a service to help students and researchers navigate searches, evaluate sources, and correctly cite references; the Research Guide EconDesk, a help desk to answer specific questions and provide advice to aid in literature searches; and the Academic Career Kit for what they refer to as Early Career Researchers.

Other helpful resources include personal literature lists, a calendar of events for relevant calls for papers, conferences, and workshops, and an economics terminology thesaurus to help in finding keywords for searches. To stay up-to-date with EconBiz, you can sign up for their newsletter.

Collection : 1,075,219

Advanced Search Options : Title, subject, author, institution, ISBN/ISSN, journal, publisher, language, OA only

15. BioMed Central

BioMed Central provides OA research from more than 300 peer-reviewed journals. While originally focused on resources related to the physical sciences, math, and engineering, BioMed Central has branched out to include journals that cover a broader range of disciplines, with the aim of providing a single platform that provides OA articles for a variety of research needs. You can browse these journals by subject or title, or you can search all articles for your required keyword.

BioMed Central has a commitment to peer-reviewed sources and to the peer review process itself, continually seeking to help and improve the peer review process. They're "committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review."

Additionally, the website includes resources to assist and support editors as part of their commitment to providing high-quality, peer-reviewed OA articles.

Collection : 507,212

Other Services : BMC administers the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) registry. While initially designed for registering clinical trials, since its creation in 2000, the registry has broadened its scope to include other health studies as well.

The registry is recognized by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), and it meets the requirements established by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

The study records included in the registry are all searchable and free to access. The ISRCTN registry "supports transparency in clinical research, helps reduce selective reporting of results and ensures an unbiased and complete evidence base."

Advanced Search Options : Author, title, journal, list

A multidisciplinary search engine, JURN provides links to various scholarly websites, articles, and journals that are free to access or OA. Covering the fields of the arts, humanities, business, law, nature, science, and medicine, JURN has indexed almost 5,000 repositories to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Search features are enhanced by Google, but searches are filtered through their index of repositories. JURN seeks to reach a wide audience, with their search engine tailored to researchers from "university lecturers and students seeking a strong search tool for OA content" and "advanced and ambitious students, age 14-18" to "amateur historians and biographers" and "unemployed and retired lecturers."

That being said, JURN is very upfront about its limitations. They admit to not being a good resource for educational studies, social studies, or psychology, and conference archives are generally not included due to frequently unstable URLs.

Collection : 5,064 indexed journals

Other Services : JURN has a browser add-on called UserScript. This add-on allows users to integrate the JURN database directly into Google Search. When performing a search through Google, the add-on creates a link that sends the search directly to JURN CSE. JURN CSE is a search service that is hosted by Google.

Clicking the link from the Google Search bar will run your search through the JURN database from the Google homepage. There is also an interface for a DuckDuckGo search box; while this search engine has an emphasis on user privacy, for smaller sites that may be indexed by JURN, DuckDuckGo may not provide the same depth of results.

Advanced Search Options : Google search modifiers

Dryad is a digital repository of curated, OA scientific research data. Launched in 2009, it is run by a not-for-profit membership organization, with a community of institutional and publisher members for whom their services have been designed. Members include institutions such as Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, as well as publishers like Oxford University Press and Wiley.

Dryad aims to "promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely reused to create knowledge." It is free to access for the search and discovery of data. Their user experience is geared toward easy self-depositing, supports Creative Commons licensing, and provides DOIs for all their content.

Note that there is a publishing charge associated if you wish to publish your data in Dryad. When searching datasets, they are accompanied by author information and abstracts for the associated studies, and citation information is provided for easy attribution.

Collection : 44,458

Advanced Search Options : No

Run by the British Library, the E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) allows you to search over 500,000 doctoral theses in a variety of disciplines. All of the doctoral theses available on EThOS have been awarded by higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

Although some full texts are behind paywalls, you can limit your search to items available for immediate download, either directly through EThOS or through an institution's website. More than half of the records in the database provide access to full-text theses.

EThOS notes that they do not hold all records for all institutions, but they strive to index as many doctoral theses as possible, and the database is constantly expanding, with approximately 3,000 new records added and 2,000 new full-text theses available every month. The availability of full-text theses is dependent on multiple factors, including their availability in the institutional repository and the level of repository development.

Collection : 500,000+

Advanced Search Options : Abstract, author's first name, author's last name, awarding body, current institution, EThOS ID, year, language, qualifications, research supervisor, sponsor/funder, keyword, title

PubMed is a research platform well-known in the fields of science and medicine. It was created and developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It has been available since 1996 and offers access to "more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books."

While PubMed does not provide full-text articles directly, and many full-text articles may be behind paywalls or require subscriptions to access them, when articles are available from free sources, such as through PubMed Central (PMC), those links are provided with the citations and abstracts that PubMed does provide.

PMC, which was established in 2000 by the NLM, is a free full-text archive that includes more than 6,000,000 records. PubMed records link directly to corresponding PMC results. PMC content is provided by publishers and other content owners, digitization projects, and authors directly.

Collection : 33,000,000+

Advanced Search Options : Author's first name, author's last name, identifier, corporation, date completed, date created, date entered, date modified, date published, MeSH, book, conflict of interest statement, EC/RN number, editor, filter, grant number, page number, pharmacological action, volume, publication type, publisher, secondary source ID, text, title, abstract, transliterated title

20. Semantic Scholar

A unique and easy-to-use resource, Semantic Scholar defines itself not just as a research database but also as a "search and discovery tool." Semantic Scholar harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to efficiently sort through millions of science-related papers based on your search terms.

Through this singular application of machine learning, Semantic Scholar expands search results to include topic overviews based on your search terms, with the option to create an alert for or further explore the topic. It also provides links to related topics.

In addition, search results produce "TLDR" summaries in order to provide concise overviews of articles and enhance your research by helping you to navigate quickly and easily through the available literature to find the most relevant information. According to the site, although some articles are behind paywalls, "the data [they] have for those articles is limited," so you can expect to receive mostly full-text results.

Collection : 203,379,033

Other Services : Semantic Scholar supports multiple popular browsers. Content can be accessed through both mobile and desktop versions of Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Additionally, Semantic Scholar provides browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox, so AI-powered scholarly search results are never more than a click away. The mobile interface includes an option for Semantic Swipe, a new way of interacting with your research results.

There are also beta features that can be accessed as part of the Beta Program, which will provide you with features that are being actively developed and require user feedback for further improvement.

Advanced Search Options : Field of study, date range, publication type, author, journal, conference, PDF

Zenodo, powered by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was launched in 2013. Taking its name from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria, Zenodo is a tool "built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in open science." Zenodo accepts all research from every discipline in any file format.

However, Zenodo also curates uploads and promotes peer-reviewed material that is available through OA. A DOI is assigned to everything that is uploaded to Zenodo, making research easily findable and citable. You can sort by keyword, title, journal, and more and download OA documents directly from the site.

While there are closed access and restricted access items in the database, the vast majority of research is OA material. Search results can be filtered by access type, making it easy to view the free articles available in the database.

Collection : 2,220,000+

Advanced Search Options : Access, file type, keywords

Check out our roundup of free research databases as a handy one-page PDF.

How to find peer-reviewed articles.

There are a lot of free scholarly articles available from various sources. The internet is a big place. So how do you go about finding peer-reviewed articles when conducting your research? It's important to make sure you are using reputable sources.

The first source of the article is the person or people who wrote it. Checking out the author can give you some initial insight into how much you can trust what you’re reading. Looking into the publication information of your sources can also indicate whether the article is reliable.

Aspects of the article, such as subject and audience, tone, and format, are other things you can look at when evaluating whether the article you're using is valid, reputable, peer-reviewed material. So, let's break that down into various components so you can assess your research to ensure that you're using quality articles and conducting solid research.

Check the Author

Peer-reviewed articles are written by experts or scholars with experience in the field or discipline they're writing about. The research in a peer-reviewed article has to pass a rigorous evaluation process, so it's a foregone conclusion that the author(s) of a peer-reviewed article should have experience or training related to that research.

When evaluating an article, take a look at the author's information. What credentials does the author have to indicate that their research has scholarly weight behind it? Finding out what type of degree the author has—and what that degree is in—can provide insight into what kind of authority the author is on the subject.

Something else that might lend credence to the author's scholarly role is their professional affiliation. A look at what organization or institution they are affiliated with can tell you a lot about their experience or expertise. Where were they trained, and who is verifying their research?

Identify Subject and Audience

The ultimate goal of a study is to answer a question. Scholarly articles are also written for scholarly audiences, especially articles that have gone through the peer review process. This means that the author is trying to reach experts, researchers, academics, and students in the field or topic the research is based on.

Think about the question the author is trying to answer by conducting this research, why, and for whom. What is the subject of the article? What question has it set out to answer? What is the purpose of finding the information? Is the purpose of the article of importance to other scholars? Is it original content?

Research should also be approached analytically. Is the methodology sound? Is the author using an analytical approach to evaluate the data that they have obtained? Are the conclusions they've reached substantiated by their data and analysis? Answering these questions can reveal a lot about the article's validity.

Format Matters

Reliable articles from peer-reviewed sources have certain format elements to be aware of. The first is an abstract. An abstract is a short summary or overview of the article. Does the article have an abstract? It's unlikely that you're reading a peer-reviewed article if it doesn't. Peer-reviewed journals will also have a word count range. If an article seems far too short or incredibly long, that may be reason to doubt it.

Another feature of reliable articles is the sections the information is divided into. Peer-reviewed research articles will have clear, concise sections that appropriately organize the information. This might include a literature review, methodology, results (in the case of research articles), and a conclusion.

One of the most important sections is the references or bibliography. This is where the researcher lists all the sources of their information. A peer-reviewed source will have a comprehensive reference section.

An article that has been written to reach an academic community will have an academic tone. The language that is used, and the way this language is used, is important to consider. If the article is riddled with grammatical errors, confusing syntax, and casual language, it almost definitely didn't make it through the peer review process.

Also consider the use of terminology. Every discipline is going to have standard terminology or jargon that can be used and understood by other academics in the discipline. The language in a peer-reviewed article is going to reflect that.

If the author is going out of their way to explain simple terms, or terms that are standard to the field or discipline, it's unlikely that the article has been peer reviewed, as this is something that the author would be asked to address during the review process.

Publication

The source of the article will be a very good indicator of the likelihood that it was peer reviewed. Where was the article published? Was it published alongside other academic articles in the same discipline? Is it a legitimate and reputable scholarly publication?

A trade publication or newspaper might be legitimate or reputable, but it is not a scholarly source, and it will not have been subject to the peer review process. Scholarly journals are the best resource for peer-reviewed articles, but it's important to remember that not all scholarly journals are peer reviewed.

It's helpful to look at a scholarly source's website, as peer-reviewed journals will have a clear indication of the peer review process. University libraries, institutional repositories, and reliable databases (and now you have a list of legit ones) can also help provide insight into whether an article comes from a peer-reviewed journal.

Common Research Mistakes to Avoid

Research is a lot of work. Even with high standards and good intentions, it's easy to make mistakes. Perhaps you searched for access to scientific journals for free and found the perfect peer-reviewed sources, but you forgot to document everything, and your references are a mess. Or, you only searched for free online articles and missed out on a ground-breaking study that was behind a paywall.

Whether your research is for a degree or to get published or to satisfy your own inquisitive nature, or all of the above, you want all that work to produce quality results. You want your research to be thorough and accurate.

To have any hope of contributing to the literature on your research topic, your results need to be high quality. You might not be able to avoid every potential mistake, but here are some that are both common and easy to avoid.

Sticking to One Source

One of the hallmarks of good research is a healthy reference section. Using a variety of sources gives you a better answer to your question. Even if all of the literature is in agreement, looking at various aspects of the topic may provide you with an entirely different picture than you would have if you looked at your research question from only one angle.

Not Documenting Every Fact

As you conduct your research, do yourself a favor and write everything down. Everything you include in your paper or article that you got from another source is going to need to be added to your references and cited.

It's important, especially if your aim is to conduct ethical, high-quality research, that all of your research has proper attribution. If you don't document as you go, you could end up making a lot of work for yourself if the information you don't write down is something that later, as you write your paper, you really need.

Using Outdated Materials

Academia is an ever-changing landscape. What was true in your academic discipline or area of research ten years ago may have since been disproven. If fifteen studies have come out since the article that you're using was published, it's more than a little likely that you're going to be basing your research on flawed or dated information.

If the information you're basing your research on isn't as up-to-date as possible, your research won't be of quality or able to stand up to any amount of scrutiny. You don't want all of your hard work to be for naught.

Relying Solely on Open Access Journals

OA is a great resource for conducting academic research. There are high-quality journal articles available through OA, and that can be very helpful for your research. But, just because you have access to free articles, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be found behind a paywall.

Just as dismissing high-quality peer-reviewed articles because they are OA would be limiting, not exploring any paid content at all is equally short-sighted. If you're seeking to conduct thorough and comprehensive research, exploring all of your options for quality sources is going to be to your benefit.

Digging Too Deep or Not Deep Enough

Research is an art form, and it involves a delicate balance of information. If you conduct your research using only broad search terms, you won't be able to answer your research question well, or you'll find that your research provides information that is closely related to your topic but, ultimately, your findings are vague and unsubstantiated.

On the other hand, if you delve deeply into your research topic with specific searches and turn up too many sources, you might have a lot of information that is adjacent to your topic but without focus and perhaps not entirely relevant. It's important to answer your research question concisely but thoroughly.

Different Types of Scholarly Articles

Different types of scholarly articles have different purposes. An original research article, also called an empirical article, is the product of a study or an experiment. This type of article seeks to answer a question or fill a gap in the existing literature.

Research articles will have a methodology, results, and a discussion of the findings of the experiment or research and typically a conclusion.

Review articles overview the current literature and research and provide a summary of what the existing research indicates or has concluded. This type of study will have a section for the literature review, as well as a discussion of the findings of that review. Review articles will have a particularly extensive reference or bibliography section.

Theoretical articles draw on existing literature to create new theories or conclusions, or look at current theories from a different perspective, to contribute to the foundational knowledge of the field of study.

10 Tips for Navigating Journal Databases

Use the right academic journal database for your search, be that interdisciplinary or specific to your field. Or both!

If it's an option, set the search results to return only peer-reviewed sources.

Start by using search terms that are relevant to your topic without being overly specific.

Try synonyms, especially if your keywords aren't returning the desired results.

Even if you've found some good articles, try searching using different terms.

Explore the advanced search features of the database(s).

Learn to use Booleans (AND, OR, NOT) to expand or narrow your results.

Once you've gotten some good results from a more general search, try narrowing your search.

Read through abstracts when trying to find articles relevant to your research.

Keep track of your research and use citation tools. It'll make life easier when it comes time to compile your references.

7 Frequently Asked Questions

1. how do i get articles for free.

Free articles can be found through free online academic journals, OA databases, or other databases that include OA journals and articles. These resources allow you to access free papers online so you can conduct your research without getting stuck behind a paywall.

Academics don't receive payment for the articles they contribute to journals. There are often, in fact, publication fees that scholars pay in order to publish. This is one of the funding structures that allows OA journals to provide free content so that you don't have to pay fees or subscription costs to access journal articles.

2. How Do I Find Journal Articles?

Journal articles can be found in databases and institutional repositories that can be accessed at university libraries. However, online research databases that contain OA articles are the best resource for getting free access to journal articles that are available online.

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best to use for academic research, and there are a number of databases where you can find peer-reviewed OA journal articles. Once you've found a useful article, you can look through the references for the articles the author used to conduct their research, and you can then search online databases for those articles, too.

3. How Do I Find Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in reputable scholarly peer-reviewed journals. High-quality journals and journal articles can be found online using academic search engines and free research databases. These resources are excellent for finding OA articles, including peer-reviewed articles.

OA articles are articles that can be accessed for free. While some scholarly search engines and databases include articles that aren't peer reviewed, there are also some that provide only peer-reviewed articles, and databases that include non-peer-reviewed articles often have advanced search features that enable you to select "peer review only." The database will return results that are exclusively peer-reviewed content.

4. What Are Research Databases?

A research database is a list of journals, articles, datasets, and/or abstracts that allows you to easily search for scholarly and academic resources and conduct research online. There are databases that are interdisciplinary and cover a variety of topics.

For example, Paperity might be a great resource for a chemist as well as a linguist, and there are databases that are more specific to a certain field. So, while ERIC might be one of the best educational databases available for OA content, it's not going to be one of the best databases for finding research in the field of microbiology.

5. How Do I Find Scholarly Articles for Specific Fields?

There are interdisciplinary research databases that provide articles in a variety of fields, as well as research databases that provide articles that cater to specific disciplines. Additionally, a journal repository or index can be a helpful resource for finding articles in a specific field.

When searching an interdisciplinary database, there are frequently advanced search features that allow you to narrow the search results down so that they are specific to your field. Selecting "psychology" in the advanced search features will return psychology journal articles in your search results. You can also try databases that are specific to your field.

If you're searching for law journal articles, many law reviews are OA. If you don't know of any databases specific to history, visiting a journal repository or index and searching "history academic journals" can return a list of journals specific to history and provide you with a place to begin your research.

6. Are Peer-Reviewed Articles Really More Legitimate?

The short answer is yes, peer-reviewed articles are more legitimate resources for academic research. The peer review process provides legitimacy, as it is a rigorous review of the content of an article that is performed by scholars and academics who are experts in their field of study. The review provides an evaluation of the quality and credibility of the article.

Non-peer-reviewed articles are not subject to a review process and do not undergo the same level of scrutiny. This means that non-peer-reviewed articles are unlikely, or at least not as likely, to meet the same standards that peer-reviewed articles do.

7. Are Free Article Directories Legitimate?

Yes! As with anything, some databases are going to be better for certain requirements than others. But, a scholarly article database being free is not a reason in itself to question its legitimacy.

Free scholarly article databases can provide access to abstracts, scholarly article websites, journal repositories, and high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles. The internet has a lot of information, and it's often challenging to figure out what information is reliable.

Research databases and article directories are great resources to help you conduct your research. Our list of the best research paper websites is sure to provide you with sources that are totally legit.

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The world’s most significant open access portfolio, we have published over 124,000 open access articles via gold open access across disciplines –from the life sciences to the humanities, representing 33% of all springer nature articles in 2020. authors can also publish their article under an open access licence in more than 2,200 of our hybrid journals..

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The following databases were selected not only for their availablity to the general public but also because of their broad appeal and scope, and access to full-text resources.

African Journals Online A service to provide access to African published research, and increase worldwide knowledge of indigenous scholarship. It's published in Africa and cover the full range of academic disciplines.
AGRICOLA This catalog of the U.S. National Agriculatural Library (NAL) provides citations to agricultural literature. The NAL houses one of the world's largest and most accessible agricultural information collections and advances access to global information for agriculture.
AIDSinfo Access to wide-ranging Federal resources on HIV/AIDS clinical research, HIV treatment and prevention, and medical practice guidelines for health care providers and consumers.
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., 2000) [UCSB call #: PE 1628 .A623 2000]
Anatomy of the Human Body by Henry Gray (20th ed., 1918) [UCSB has later editions at: QM 23.2 .G73]
The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer (1918)
Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) [various call numbers at UCSB]
The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed., 2001) [UCSB call #: Ref AG 5 .C725 2000]
Columbia Gazetteer of North America (2000) [UCSB call #: Ref E 35 .C65 2000]
Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett (10th ed., 1919) [UCSB call #: Spec. Coll. PN 6081 .B29 1902; later editions at: PN 6081 .B29 and in Reference at: PN 6081 .B27]
Robert's Rules of Order Revised (1915) [UCSB call #: Ref JF515 .W42 for latest edition]
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus (3rd ed., 1995) [UCSB call #: Ref PE1591 .B35]
Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988) "The Most Notable Quotes, 1950-1988" [UCSB call #: Ref PN 6083 .S53 1988]
The World Factbook (2008)
BioMed Central Publisher of 187 peer-reviewed open access journals.
bizjournals Features local business news from around the nation, top business stories from American City's print editions and industry-specific news from more than 40 industries with access to each of the 42 local business sites; contains 1.25 million business news articles published since 1996.
BPubs.com The Business Publications Search Engine Organized by various business categories, this site provides links to full text business articles on the web.
Chaucer Bibliography Online The Online Chaucer Bibliography includes materials from the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography published annually in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (call number: PR 1901 .S78) and is sponsored by the NCS and the library of the University of Texas at San Antonio. (Note: "Title" searching is searching for the beginning of the title, not for keywords in the title.
Chemistry Central Publishing peer-reviewed open access research in chemistry, from BioMed Central - the leading biomedical open access publisher. This site features chemistry-related articles published in Chemistry Central Journal, BioMed Central journals and independent journals utilizing BioMed Central's open access publishing services. All original research articles published by, or in cooperation with, Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
ClinicalTrials.gov A registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers for more details. This information should be used in conjunction with advice from health care professionals.
Core Documents of U. S. Democracy To provide American citizens direct online access to the basic Federal Government documents that define our democratic society, a core group of current and historical Government publications is being made available for free, permanent, public access. In addition to full ASCII text, some documents, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are available as scanned images of the original manuscripts. Document texts range from the Articles of Confederation to the current United States Government Manual, Statistical Abstracts and Code of Federal Regulations.
Dictionary.com Dictionary.com provides searchable access to several dictionaries, most notably, the American Heritage Dictionary , 3rd ed. (1996,1992) (in print at PE 1628 .A623 1992), plus Roget's Thesaurus, and links to a number of other dictionary sites on the web.
Directory of Open Access Journals This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. Covers nearly 150,000 articles in 834 searchable journals.
Energy Citations Database Free access to over 2.3 million science research citations with access to over 179,000 electronic documents, primarily from 1943 forward, made publicly available by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). ECD includes scientific and technical research results in disciplines of interest to DOE such as chemistry, physics, materials, environmental science, geology, engineering, mathematics, climatology, oceanography, computer science and related disciplines. It includes bibliographic citations to report literature, conference papers, journal articles, books, dissertations, and patents.
English Broadside Ballad Archive Created by the Early Modern Center in the English Department at UCSB, the English Broadside Ballad Archive (formerly, Pepys Ballad Archive) offers a fully-searchable database of over 1,800 broadside ballads, mostly of the seventeenth century and mostly in black-letter print. The ballads were collected by Samuel Pepys into five albums, which are held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The ballads in the database are accessible as facsimiles, as facsimile transcriptions, and as recorded songs. Also provided are full citations for the ballads as well as background essays about ballad culture of the period and Pepys’s categories for organizing his collection.
Espacenet (European Patent Office) The European Patent Office's Esp@acenet provides detailed searching of EPO and PCT patent applications for the last 24 months, and worldwide patent documents searchable by patent number as early as 1920 for some issuing nations.
FWS National Image Library U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's online collection of public domain still photographs, containing still photo images of wildlife, plants, National Wildlife Refuges and other scenics, as well as wildlife management work.
Google Scholar Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Govinfo From the U.S. Government Printing Office: provides free electronic access to a wealth of important information products produced by the Federal Government. The information provided on this site is the official, published version.
Hearth Hearth is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site.
Encyclopedia.com Contains nearly 200,000 brief entries from the Britannica , Oxford University Press , and Columbia Encyclopedia .
HighWire Press Free full-text articles in science disciplines, from HighWire Press at Stanford University.
ibiblio One of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
InfoPlease Search the Information Please almanac and timeline, their atlas, the Columbia Encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Information Please has been providing authoritative answers to all kinds of factual questions since 1938.
Audio Archive The Archive contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download.
Live Music Archive The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree wiki to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.
Moving Images Collections This collection of thousands of digital movies is free and open for everyone to use. It includes the Prelinger Archive, a collection of nearly 2,000 advertising and educational films from 1927 to the present.
Text Archive This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text.
Library of Congress Digital Collections This Library of Congress project provides access to a large number of LoC collections, searchable and browsable by subject and title, including a large quantity of digitized primary source material.
MagPortal "Find individual articles from many free magazines by browsing the categories or using the search engine."
Making of America: at Cornell University and University of Michigan Hosted at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The Cornell collection currently contains 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints while the Michigan collection contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints, estimated at over 3% of all American monographs published in the 19th century. All are in the form of searchable scanned images.
MedKnow Publications The largest publisher in India for academic and scientific biomedical journals, publishing high quality peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Medknow, with over 40 print + online journals, is probably the largest open access publisher of print journals in the world and provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals.
MedlinePlus "Extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 740 topics on conditions, diseases and wellness. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials."
Online Exhibits Features high resolution images of a variety of manuscripts, artworks and photographs from the U.S. National Archives.
Featured Documents
America's Historical Documents The National Archives preserves and provides access to the records of the Federal Government. Here is a sample of these records, from our most celebrated milestones to little-known surprises.
Educators & Students: Primary Sources and Activities A large number of collections of primary documents and images arranged for use by teachers of history, civics or use of government documents.
National Forest Service Library Catalog of records to Forest Service Research publications dating back to 1904. Includes almost 6,000 full-text publications.
National Service Center for Environmental Publications A database of over 24,000 full-text U.S. EPA documents
NCJRS Virtual Library (National Criminal Justice Reference Service) Access to more than 3,500 full text publications and more than 190,000 abstracts, or summaries, of publications on this site and from NCJRS partner agency websites.
O*NET OnLine From the U.S. Department of Labor, the Occupational Information Network is a comprehensive database of worker attributes and job characteristics. The O*NET database includes information on skills, abilities, knowledges, work activities, and interests associated with occupations. Information in O*NET is available for over 800 occupations. Each occupational title and code is based on the most current version of the Standard Occupational Classification system.O*NET replaces the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT).
Online Archive of California The Online Archive of California is a collaborative project to create a searchable online union database of finding aids to archival collections. This database includes the finding aids to repositories from more than 90 institutions statewide including all nine UC campuses, and is continuing to expand. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of collections, their intellectual organization and, at varying levels of analysis, of individual items in the collections. A small but increasing number of the finding aids contain links to online digital versions of the source material.
The Online Books Page "Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web," by author, title, subject, and other features, such as: "A Celebration of Women Writers," "Banned Books Online," "Prize Winners Online," "Foreign Language," and "Specialty" by subject. This site also links to extensive directories which list thousands more online books.
OSTI.gov Search the U.S. Dept. of Energy's scientific and technical research reports in the sciences including biology, environmental sciences, physics, energy, and other topics.
Paper of Record Building the world's largest searchable archive of historical newspapers. Over 21 million images in the collection so far. Searchable newspaper image documents presented in their original published form.
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is one of the earliest attempts to provide widespread access to public domain books via the Internet. As of 2002, it offers about 6,200 works, adding about 150 per month. Files are in plain ASCII text or in zipped ASCII text, available from a number of mirror sites around the world. The Project Gutenberg catalog is searchable by author and title. Author and title lists may be downloaded by FTP.
PLoS: Public Library of Science A nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
PubMed Central (PMC) The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Science.gov Science.gov is a gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results.
USPTO Patent Database The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)'s Patent Databases allows searching of the bibliographic data (titles, inventors, assignees, class codes, references, etc.) or full text in US patents issued since 1976.
USPTO Trademark Database The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)'s Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searching of the key data (titles, owners, relevant dates) in current Federal trademarks and inactive ones back to 1984. Results display the trademark text data and, in many cases, the images for graphic trademarks. It does not include state or foreign trademarks.

Updated: 10/12/20

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30 May 2024
Correction 03 June 2024

Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape

Dalmeet Singh Chawla 0

Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.

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Viewed through a window covered in red handwritten notes, a man wearing safety goggles holds a piece of repaired broken resin glass.

Japan plans to make all publicly funded research available to read in institutional repositories. Credit: Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty

The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from April 2025.

The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration”, says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan .

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S , to accelerate the move to OA publishing . The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.

Institutional repositories

When the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced Japan’s pivot to OA in February, it also said that it would invest ¥10 billion (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open.

Among the roughly 800 universities in Japan, more than 750 already have an institutional repository, says Shimasaki Seiichi, director of the Space Development and Utilization Division at MEXT in Tokyo, who was involved with drawing up the plan. Each university will host the research produced by its academics, but the underlying software will be the same.

In 2022, Japan also launched its own national preprint server, Jxiv , but its use remains limited, with only a few hundred preprint articles posted on the platform so far. Ide says that publishing as preprints is not yet habitual for many researchers in Japan, noting that only around one in five respondents to his 2023 survey 1 on Jxiv were even aware that it existed.

Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on ‘green OA’ — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi.

Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities. Publishers levy an article-processing charge (APC) if the paper is made free to read, rather than being paywalled, a fee that covers a publisher’s costs.

APCs are increasing at an average rate of 4.3% per year, notes Johan Rooryck, a scholar of French linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and executive director of cOAlition S.

Rooryck says that Japan’s green OA strategy should be applauded. “It’s definitely something that one should do,” he says. “Especially for all the content that is still behind the paywall.”

Kathleen Shearer, executive director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories in Montreal, Canada, says that the Japanese plan is “equitable”.

“It doesn’t matter where you publish, whether you have APCs or not, you are still able to comply with an open-access policy,” she says.

She adds that the policy will mean that Japan has a unified record of all research produced by its academics, because all institutional repositories are hosted on the same national server. “Japan is way ahead of the rest of us,” Shearer says. “More countries are moving in this direction but Japan really was one of the first.”

Focusing on institutional repositories will have another benefit: it will not discriminate against research published in Japanese, Shearer says. “A big part of their scholarly ecosystem is represented in Japanese.”

Japanese research is no longer world class — here’s why

The plan to move to OA and support Japanese universities’ repositories comes as Japan grapples with its declining standing in international research.

In a report released last October, MEXT found that Japan’s world-class research status is declining . For instance, Japan’s share in the top 10% of most-cited papers has dipped from 6% to 2%, placing it 13th on the list of nations, despite Japan having the 5th-highest research output.

In March, Japan vowed to triple its number of doctorate holders by 2040, after another report found that the country’s number of PhD graduates is also declining, making it an outlier among the major economies.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01493-8

Updates & Corrections

Correction 03 June 2024 : The original version of this article incorrectly stated the date of the commencement of the open access policy, and incorrectly identified Shimasaki Seiichi's job title. The text has been updated.

Ide, K. & Nakayama, J.-I. Genes Cells 28 , 333–337 (2023).

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The problem with making all academic research free

T here has been an earthquake in my corner of academia that will affect who teaches in prestigious universities and what ideas circulate among educated people around the world.

And it all happened because a concept rooted in good intentions — that academic research should be “open access,” free for everyone to read — has started to go too far.

The premise of open-access publishing is simple and attractive. It can cost libraries thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to academic journals, which sometimes means only academics affiliated with wealthy colleges and universities may access that research. But under open-access publishing, nearly anyone with an internet connection can find and read those articles for free. Authors win, because they find more readers. Academics around the world benefit, because they can access the latest scholarship. And the world wins, because scientific and intellectual progress is facilitated by the free exchange of ideas.

By now this model has taken hold in the natural sciences, especially in biology and biomedicine; during the pandemic many publishers removed paywalls from articles about vaccines and treatments. The Biden administration requires federally funded scholarly publications to be made freely available without any delay.

However, there is no such thing as a free academic article. Even with digital distribution, the expenses of running a journal are considerable. These costs include hosting the websites where people submit, peer-review, and edit articles; copyediting; advertising; preserving journal archives; and maintaining continuity as editors come and go.

As a result, unless journals have a source of revenue other than subscription fees, any move toward open access raises the question of who will cover the costs of publication.

One answer is that the money will come from authors themselves or their academic institutions or other backers. This works well enough in the natural sciences, because those researchers are often funded by grants, and some of that money can be set aside to cover a journal’s fees for publishing scientific articles. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demands that all research funded by the foundation, including the underlying data, be published open access.

According to an MIT study , however, only a small fraction of scholars in the humanities publish their articles on an open-access basis. Unlike biologists and biomedical engineers, humanities scholars such as philosophers and historians do not get grants that can cover the publishing costs.

This means that if open access is to take hold in those fields as well — as many publishers and academics are advocating — the costs will have to be covered by some foundation or other sponsor, by the scholars’ institutions, or even by the scholars themselves. And all these models have serious downsides.

I’m a political philosopher. The earthquake in my field that I mentioned earlier shook one of our most prominent journals: the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Publishing an article in this journal has long made the difference between whether a candidate gets hired, tenured, or promoted at an elite institution of higher education. The high quality has stemmed in large part from the rigorous approach of the founding editor, Robert Goodin.

At the end of 2023, the publisher, Wiley, terminated its contract with Goodin. The reasons were not immediately clear, and over 1,000 academics, including me, signed a petition stating that we would not serve on the editorial board or write or review for the journal until Wiley reinstates Goodin. I recently attended a panel at an American Philosophical Association conference where philosophers voiced their anger and puzzlement about the situation.

One source of the problem appears to be that Wiley now charges the authors of an article or their institutions $3,840 to get published open access in the journal.

The Journal of Political Philosophy is actually hybrid open access, which means it waives the article processing charges for authors who permit their work to appear behind a subscription-only paywall. Nonetheless, Goodin and Anna Stilz , a Princeton professor and Journal of Political Philosophy editorial board member, point out that publishers like Wiley now have a strong incentive to favor open-access articles.

In the old model, in which university libraries subscribed to journals, editors were mainly incentivized to publish first-rate material that would increase subscriptions. In the open-access model, however, now that authors or their universities must cover the costs of processing articles, publishers of humanities journals seem to be incentivized to boost revenue by accepting as many articles as possible. According to Goodin , open access has “been the death knell of quality academic publishing.” The reason that Goodin lost his job, Goodin and Stilz imply, is that Wiley pressured Goodin to accept more articles to increase Wiley’s profits, and he said no. (Wiley representatives say that lines of communication had collapsed with Goodin.)

Early this year, Goodin cofounded a new journal titled simply Political Philosophy . The journal will be published by the Open Library of Humanities, which is subsidized by libraries and institutions around the world. But this version of open-access publishing does not have the financial stability of the old subscription model. Scholars affiliated with the Open Library of Humanities have pointed out that the project has substantial overhead costs, and it relied on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has already ended. The Open Library of Humanities is an experiment, and I hope that it works, but as of now it publishes only 30 journals , compared with the 1,600 journals that Wiley publishes.

The fact remains that no one has satisfactorily explained how open access could work in the humanities and social sciences.

In his 2023 book “ Athena Unbound : Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All,” UCLA history professor Peter Baldwin attempts an answer. He points to Latin America, where some national governments cover all expenses of academic publishing. But this proposal ignores the fact that the governments of the United States and other nations probably do not want to pay for humanities and social sciences journals.

Baldwin also floats the idea of preprint depositories where academics could share documents on the cloud before they have undergone the (somewhat expensive) process of peer review. But this means that academics would lose the benefits that come from getting double-blind feedback from one’s peers. This idea would reduce the costs of publishing a journal article, but it would turn much academic writing into fancy blogging.

Ultimately, Baldwin’s solution is that authors might “have to participate directly, giving them skin in the game and helping contain costs.” This means academics might ask their employers to pay the article processing charges, ask a journal for the processing fees to be waived, or dig into their own pockets to pay to publish.

And it might mean less gets published overall. The journal Government and Opposition, published by Cambridge University Press, is entirely open access and charges $3,450 for an article to be published. I’d have to apply for a discount or a waiver to publish there. Or I could do what political philosophers in Japan and Bosnia and Herzegovina have told me they do: avoid submitting to open-access journals. Their universities will not cover their article processing charges except maybe in the top journals, and even the reduced fees can run into hundreds of dollars that these professors do not have.

In “Athena Unbound,” Baldwin notes that Harvard subscribes to 10 times as many periodicals as India’s Institute of Science. One can bemoan this fact, but one may also appreciate that Harvard’s largesse spread enough subscription revenue around to reputable journals to enable academics to avoid paying to publish in them, no matter whether they teach at regional state schools, non-elite private schools, or institutions of higher education in poor countries. For all its flaws, the old model meant that when rich alumni donated to their alma maters, it increased library budgets and thereby made it possible for scholars of poetry and state politics to run and publish in academic journals.

Until we have more evidence that open-access journals in the humanities and social sciences can thrive in the long run, academics need to appreciate the advantages of the subscription model.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University in New York City.

The problem with making all academic research free

Copyright and Open Access to Scientific Publishing

Open access
Published: 27 May 2024

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The internet has broadened the communication of digitized journals and books among scholars and the perception that academic commercial publishers use copyright law to restrict the free circulation of scientific knowledge. Open access is changing the business model of academic publishing to the extent that copyright law is increasingly being viewed as needing to be balanced against the right to benefit from science. Some have called for copyright law to be revised to promote open access to academic publishing. The question of just how copyright law should be revised to achieve this is today more topical than ever. However, there is a need to clarify and question the role that copyright law should play and there is much to be gained from consideration of the role that competition law can play. Additionally, initiatives to implement open access have been taken by stakeholders (academic authors, publishers, universities, libraries, and research funding agencies) such as open access policies and the new “read and publish” agreements between publishers and universities’ libraries. But the transition towards sustainable universal open access will be a long, complex process since the interaction between these stakeholders can lead to conflicts of interest. This article also evaluates these initiatives and suggests the best approach.

Open Access Publishing in the European Union: The Example of Scientific Works

Academic Freedom, Copyright, and Access to Scholarly Works: A Comparative Perspective

The evolving role of commercial publishers and the future of open access repositories: the potential of corporate social responsibility.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

Progress in science benefits society; yet new findings in scientific research – published in books, articles, conference papers and presentations – are copyright protected. As such, copyright can be seen as the instrument publishers use to exercise control over the circulation of knowledge, enabling them to prevent access to scholarly publications. Indeed, it has been pointed out that, by limiting the ability to share published scientific knowledge, this prevailing restricted-access dissemination model inhibits the emergence of a truly global and collaborative scientific community. Footnote 1

The open access (OA) paradigm that has emerged with the advent of the internet is a reaction against this model. As one of the leading proponents of OA stresses, open access literature is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”. Footnote 2 Nonetheless, OA is not antithetical to copyright: in fact, OA publishing is based on copyright licenses granted by scholars. The authors themselves lift the barriers imposed by copyright and agree to publish the output of their research and to disseminate their findings with the sole restriction that their authorship be mentioned and any commercial uses be impeded. Thus, OA is enabled by copyright. Footnote 3

Importantly, in the case of OA literature, authors are unpaid, yet publishers claim a fee to publish their articles and books in OA – the so-called “article processing charge” (APC) or “book processing charge” (BPC) that allows publishers to recoup the costs incurred in improving the quality of the article or book and processing it in a publishable form. In this sense, publishers address OA publishing as a new business model, in which APCs and BPCs are substitutes for subscription license payments and book sales. No remuneration of authors is contemplated in APCs or BPCs.

OA to scholarly publishing is also feasible without paying publishers’ processing charges if the pre-print version of paywall publications is made publicly available in institutional repositories (so-called green OA). Indeed, the EU and some national research bodies have implemented measures to ensure that scholarly publications resulting from their funding are made publicly available in public depositories immediately upon publication. Footnote 4 However, publishers claim that embargo-free green OA is not financially sustainable, since it threatens their subscription business model and undermines their potential support for OA journals based on APCs. Footnote 5 Hence, it is evident that publishers will only agree to OA publishing if they can find a sustainable business model to achieve it at scale. Therefore, any claim that copyright is the main obstacle to the implementation of OA is highly questionable. Despite this, many voices call for amendments to copyright law to facilitate OA to scholarly publishing.

This paper seeks to examine the implications of copyright for OA to scholarly publishing. First, it considers the extent to which copyright constitutes a barrier to scientific knowledge, and whether the right to benefit from science and culture justifies mandatory OA to scholarly publishing or rather requires an adjustment to copyright law. Second, this paper analyses the copyright issues and challenges associated with different initiatives to foster OA, including open access policies, amendments to copyright legislation, and the new read and publish agreements between publishers and research institutions. Finally, the economic and competition law issues that arise in relation to OA publishing are examined.

2 Copyright as a Barrier to Scientific Advancement

The shift from analog to digital publications has increased the perception that copyright protection of scientific works impedes access to knowledge that should be free. However, as stressed in the Introduction of this article, the OA movement does not oppose copyright protection of scientific publishing: what the leading voices of the OA movement claim is that copyright on research articles traditionally protected publishers, not authors, Footnote 6 and that copyright is being used by some publishers to keep their business profitable. Footnote 7

The academic publishing market has been characterized by a number of long-standing disruptions: many researchers agree to publish their contributions in journals (and even in books) without any remuneration. Academics view scholarly publishing as a means of facilitating the dissemination of their research and building a reputation, both by publishing in high impact factor journals and via the system of citations. Footnote 8 For this reason, it has been argued that conventional copyright rationale does not serve as an economic incentive for researchers and should be abolished for academic works. Footnote 9 However, such a view is open to debate. The fact that most academic authors do not share in the publishers’ profits does not justify depriving them of the right to claim copyright royalties from publishers. Nor does it affect the role and function of copyright. As discussed, the view that academic authors spurn the idea of making money from the use of copyright works for research and education, being satisfied with the enhancement to their reputation and funding opportunities, may be philosophically sound, but is contractually anomalous. Footnote 10

Criticism has also been expressed of the limited concern shown by copyright law for the scientific perspective, as well as the weak research exceptions to copyright exclusive rights and the general trend towards broadening copyright protection – all elements that conspire against freedom to access and exchange information, disseminate knowledge, and preserve research results. Footnote 11 The recent COVID-19 pandemic served to highlight the right to science together with the urgent need to address a new copyright regime. Footnote 12 Copyright laws are said to act like a lock on the open circulation of research and scholarship. They fail to serve their original purpose of promoting science in the digital era. Footnote 13 Some authors contend that reconceptualizing copyright in relation to research activities can provide powerful arguments for substantive changes in copyright law; Footnote 14 hence, the question of the most suitable copyright design for academic works is today more topical than ever. Footnote 15

Before assessing whether copyright law should be amended or even abolished in the case of scholarly publishing, so as to guarantee access to scientific knowledge, it is necessary, first, to consider the scope of the right “to benefit from science” and its legal implications for access to academic publishing and, second, to assess how copyright might act as a barrier to scientific knowledge.

2.1 The Right to Benefit from Science

To date, the right to benefit from science has been inadequately discussed, despite being recognized, with a variety of different wording, in instruments of human rights. In fact, some scientists describe this right as “obscure” and its interpretation as “neglected” to the point that few are aware of its existence. Footnote 16

The right to enjoy the benefits of science has traditionally been invoked as a counterweight to the expansion of intellectual property (above all patents), whereas the “right to participate in culture” is seen as articulating a series of values that limit copyright. Footnote 17 Yet, copyright protects scientific works and, as such, can impede access to research findings.

2.1.1 Scope of the Right to Benefit from Science

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations in 1948, was the first international legal instrument to recognize the fundamental right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits”, along with cultural rights and the protection of authors’ rights (Art. 27 UDHR). Footnote 18 The drafting history of Art. 27 shows that the inclusion of individual author’s and inventor’s rights in an article on public rights of access to science was strongly debated, but that the primary concern was that the protection of these individual rights should not cut across the public good of facilitating access to knowledge, culture, and science, whether for liberal, utilitarian, or communitarian reasons. Footnote 19

Almost twenty years later, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted by the United Nations in 1966, recognized the right of everyone to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications”, after recognizing the right to “take part in cultural life”, while guaranteeing the protection of intellectual property (Art. 15.1). Footnote 20 In the travaux préparatoires of the ICESCR, some countries objected to incorporating the provision on intellectual property on the grounds that everyone’s right to benefit from science and participate in culture should not be intermixed with property rights. Footnote 21 However, it was argued that the three rights were substantively interrelated, each being instrumental to the realization of the others. The rights of authors and scientists to prevent others from altering their creations were understood to be essential preconditions for cultural freedom and participation and scientific progress. Footnote 22

In the case of the UDHR, the wording of the right to benefit from science has been described as being more akin to that of a freedom than a positive right that states must enable. Footnote 23 In contrast, the ICESCR sets out specific obligations incumbent upon states for guaranteeing the right to benefit from science, such as taking the steps necessary for “the conservation, the development, and the diffusion of science” (Art. 15.2). Footnote 24 Indeed, today, there is a growing consensus that the core content of the right to benefit from science in the ICESCR includes an obligation on states to enable access to scientific information. Footnote 25

The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (1950) does not include any provision on the right to benefit from science; rather the right is understood as a form of collective freedom of expression: Art. 10 talks of the freedom to “receive and impart information and ideas without interference”. As such, the states’ obligations are negative and limited to not interfering with this freedom, rather than requiring a proactive realization of the right to benefit from science. Footnote 26

Regarding academic freedom, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000) recognizes scientific research as the scientist’s autonomy to conduct research: Article 13 states that “[t]he arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint. Academic freedom shall be respected”. Accordingly, in the case of Commission v. Hungary , the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared that “academic freedom in research […] should guarantee freedom of expression and of action, freedom to disseminate information and freedom to conduct research and to distribute knowledge and truth without restriction”. Footnote 27

Thus, it seems that international recognition of the right to benefit from science and the right to conduct research free of any constraints contained in human rights instruments cannot be considered as granting researchers individual rights to access scientific output, but rather as obliging states to protect science as a public good. For instance, Art. 44 of the Spanish Constitution (1978) provides that culture and science and scientific research be promoted by public authorities. Yet, some authors argue that a new fundamental right to research is derived from the interplay between the right to benefit from science (as recognized under the UDHR and the ICESCR), freedom of expression and academic freedom, in combination with the European Union’s aims and objectives regarding sustainability and technological advancement. Footnote 28 According to these authors, the fundamental right to research enables access to information to conduct research . Footnote 29 This opinion is supported by those who believe that EU legislation is under an obligation to create a more favourable, enabling environment for scientific research. Footnote 30

But what are we supposed to understand by the argument that the right to benefit from science should enable access to information to facilitate research? Does this imply that access to scientific publications should be free and without copyright restrictions?

2.1.2 The Right to Benefit from Science, and Access to Scientific Publishing

The United Nations, in its legal instrument, appears to explicitly link science and technology with human rights, considering such ties beneficial to human lives. Footnote 31 As such, it could be argued that the right to benefit from science justifies mandatory OA only in the case of research publications that contribute to human well-being and better life conditions. But it might also be concluded that OA should be mandatory for scholarly publishing across the board, since all journal articles are scientific , regardless of their area of knowledge.

How can scientific publications be defined? Neither the UDHR nor the ICESCR chooses to define what science is. The Venice Statement on the Right to Enjoy the Benefits of Scientific Progress and its Applications , adopted by experts convened by UNESCO in 2009, declares that the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress is applicable to all fields of science, Footnote 32 where science is deemed, among other things, an instrument for “advancing knowledge of a specific subject matter” and “procuring a set of data and testing hypotheses that may be useful for some practical purpose”. Footnote 33

Indeed, science can be distinguished from other domains of culture and knowledge by its progressive nature. Footnote 34 The natural sciences, as well as the human and social sciences, including history and economics, also advance thanks to research findings based on procuring sets of data and testing hypotheses. Since the first journals with a specific orientation emerged in 1870, scientific publications have been defined according to a methodology that meets the following conditions: identification of the problem tackled in the publication, sequential development of the argument, description of the methods used, presentation of empirical evidence, obligatory links – using citations – to earlier communications by other scientists, and admissibility of presenting speculative thought. Footnote 35 This methodology has been adopted by all academic journals regardless of their area of specialization (be it the natural sciences, philosophy, or even law). Thus, the right to benefit from science might be expanded to all scholarly publications, as all of them can be considered scientific.

Yet, to argue that the right to enjoy the benefits of science means states should be obliged to impose mandatory OA on scientific publishing does not seem entirely admissible. The UNESCO Draft Recommendation on Open Science (November 2021) Footnote 36 identifies a set of actions whereby Member States can promote OA infrastructure, including journals and OA publication platforms, repositories and archives. According to the Recommendation , mandatory OA is only required in the case of research promoted by public funding. Footnote 37 Thus, the right to benefit from science requires that states encourage , rather than actually impose, OA for all scientific publications.

2.2 Copyright Protection of Scientific Works

In 1907, Josef Kohler, the German jurist accredited with establishing the concept of rights to immaterial goods and laying the foundations for copyright in Germany and Europe, described scientific works protected by copyright as explanations of research findings and clarifications of their grounds. Footnote 38 For Kohler, scientific works were literary works that explained discoveries and research findings. But inasmuch as scientific works may also include figures, drawings, photographs and images describing these findings or elements of nature, they can also be considered plastic or artistic works, which – provided they are original – enjoy copyright protection. Other examples of scientific works protected by copyright include audiovisual works (such as documentaries explaining discoveries) and scientific databases.

Interestingly, participants at the 1883 conference organized by the Association Littéraire et Artistique International debated whether or not to include the term scientific in the title of the Berne Convention for Protection of Literary and Artistic Works adopted in 1886, Footnote 39 but deemed it irrelevant. Footnote 40 Nonetheless, Art. 2 of the Berne Convention states that the expression “literary and artistic” works shall include “every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression” . However, the term scientific production does not refer to such things as scientific discoveries. The use of “literary, scientific and artistic” to qualify the productions protected by the Berne Convention derives from earlier bilateral conventions on copyright between Member States; as some scholars point out, the term should not be taken at face value. Footnote 41

Indeed, most European national copyright laws hold that the object of copyright protection is literary and artistic works , and make no mention of scientific works, although the latter are included in their illustrative lists of copyrighted works. Footnote 42 However, both German and Spanish Copyright Acts explicitly hold that copyright protects literary, scientific, and artistic works. Footnote 43 German commentators point out that any difference between these three categories is irrelevant in terms of law, since scientific works may also be literary or artistic works; what defines the category of scientific works is the subject matter. Footnote 44 Meanwhile, Spanish commentators describe scientific works as those that deal with scientific discoveries, theories, methods, and ideas, and note that their content is free, but the wording, images or figures created by the author to explain the content is copyright protected. Footnote 45

In short, scientific works are defined by their science-related content. However, they have a hybrid character, as their form contains elements of personal expression, and they constitute non-substitutable building blocks of information. Footnote 46 Research publications are an example of scientific works that are protected by copyright if they “reflect the author’s personality”. Footnote 47 But how does a researcher make free and creative choices in a scientific work? What part of a scientific article or book results from the author’s original creativity, if it deals with research findings and scientific information?

2.2.1 Author’s Creation versus Research Findings

As Kohler noted, a research finding is not the creation of an author but a “scientific truth”. Footnote 48 The Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart, in distinguishing discovery from invention, remarked that the object of the former was “to bring to light something which did exist, but which was concealed from common observation”. Footnote 49 Research findings are, or should be, free because they result from obtaining, contrasting, and verifying empirical evidence about facts or truths that were previously unknown. For instance, if an article reports the risk factors for COVID-19 in inflammatory bowel disease, or new findings about Russian exiles in Spain between 1914 and 1920, the respective authors did not create the results obtained, but rather found evidence to demonstrate them . Yet, research findings were considered a possible object of intellectual property (in addition to patents and copyright) in discussions conducted at international level between the First and Second World Wars, although interest eventually declined and then completely dropped away with the advent of the global crisis. Footnote 50

In the case of contributions that count as authorial from the standpoint of science – such as research publications – the focus for copyright is on verbal expression, on the choice and ordering of words, rather than on the generation of data or ideas. Footnote 51 Consequently, copyright prevents copying of the original explanations used by a researcher when clarifying hypotheses or describing the procedures used and difficulties encountered when conducting the study, as well as of the final conclusions drawn in the publication. Likewise, copyright prevents copying of any original images, graphics or photographs created by the author to illustrate the processes, data, formulae, or elements related to the study’s theories, findings or discoveries. Conversely, those elements of a research publication that are not created by the author (i.e. data, empirical evidence, research processes, experiment results, formulae, elements of nature, etc.) are not copyright protected. They can therefore be copied, distributed, and further communicated to the public. As Art 9.2 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) states: “Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such”.

This leads to the conclusion that copyright does not protect the scientific information in research publications but rather the originality of the author in expounding the findings, data, hypotheses, or procedures. Originality is what authors give material form to and what justifies the granting of copyright, Footnote 52 whereas science is concerned with the empirical evidence. But creativity and science are not antithetical. The original explanations written by scientists, the conclusions they elaborate from the research conducted, or the images created to present their findings may also be relevant for scientific advancement, and help other researchers to understand their findings more fully, since they complement the information provided in the rest of the article or book. From this perspective, it can be argued that copyright does not put a lock on the scientific information contained in research publications but rather prevents copying of the content created by researchers when explaining or expounding their findings in their publications.

However, if scientific journals are included in databases, publishers may be entitled to prevent extraction of the scientific data contained in their journals under the sui generis right provided for in EU Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases. Footnote 53 This right is granted to a publisher if they can prove substantial investment in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the contents of a journal’s database. As a result, national legislators have limited the scope of copyright and the sui generis right by introducing certain exceptions, thereby allowing limited free use of scientific works and scientific data for research purposes.

2.2.2 The Adjustment of Copyright Law to Facilitate Research

To date, EU copyright law has recognized two main exceptions regarding science: the research exception , as introduced by the Information Society Directive (ISD) in 2001, Footnote 54 and the text and data mining exception for the purposes of scientific research , which was implemented by the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSMD) in 2019. Footnote 55 However, the scope of the ISD research exception is narrow, especially when applied to research publications, and the new text and data mining (TDM) exception of the DSMD raises a number of controversial legal questions.

Article 5(3)(a) ISD allows copyrighted content to be reproduced and communicated to the public for scientific research, solely for non-commercial purposes, as long as the source and the author’s name are indicated. Footnote 56 In the case of research publications, this exception is basically the equivalent of quotation. As has been noted, reproduction and extraction for scientific peer review and joint research are not necessarily exempt under national implementations of the somewhat vague Art. 5(3)(a) ISD; Footnote 57 indeed, some scholars argue that the scope of this exception should be broader. Footnote 58 Moreover, the ISD makes the research exception optional throughout the EU Member States when it ought to be mandatory and have the same scope to provide legal certainty to researchers across Europe. Footnote 59

By contrast, the new TDM exception for the purposes of scientific research, as laid down in Art. 3 DSMD, is mandatory throughout the EU. This new exception – where TDM is defined as “the automated processing […] of large volumes of text and data to uncover new knowledge or insights” Footnote 60 – can play an important role in research projects that require the extraction of data from protected literary and artistic works. Footnote 61 The exception allows universities and research institutes, acting on a not-for-profit basis, to reproduce and extract data from research publications to carry out TDM for scientific research; importantly, it requires that they have lawful access to content. Footnote 62 The EU Directive clarifies that “lawful access” to content may be provided by OA licenses or through contractual arrangements, such as subscriptions . Footnote 63

As noted, subscriptions to journal databases give publishers too much scope for limiting TDM initiatives by means of contracts or technical protection measures. Footnote 64 The TDM exception for scientific research implies that publishers should be unable to use their contractual powers and technical protection measures to limit researchers’ ability to engage in TDM by imposing restrictions on access and use of their database content in exchange for making this content available. Footnote 65

In conclusion, copyright law has already been adjusted to facilitate research but not to facilitate the transition to open access. Additionally, other legal initiatives to foster open access have been undertaken by the main stakeholders in scientific publishing.

3 Initiatives to Foster Open Access

Sustainable universal OA to scientific publishing would undoubtedly benefit the research community. However, the transition to OA is set to be long and complex, as the interests of research funders, authors, universities, and commercial publishers clash with each other. Indeed, the tensions between these different stakeholders are currently reflected in the opposing stances they adopt in relation to any transition to OA. Yet, various initiatives have been taken: funders, higher educational institutions (HEIs) and research centres are adopting OA policies; some European countries have recently recognized a new right for scholars to publish in OA; and publishers are transforming their subscription agreements with institutions and authors to facilitate OA publishing.

3.1 Open Access Policies of Funders and Research Institutions

National governments are under growing pressure to promote the OA of scientific publishing. In the UK, following publication of the Finch Report in 2012, OA has become government policy, Footnote 66 and UK research and innovation policy on OA has not permitted a publisher-requested delay or “embargo period” between the publication of an article and public access to that article in a public depository since 2022. Footnote 67 In the same year, the Spanish Science Law was amended, requiring researchers who benefit from public funding to deposit the manuscript version of their articles in a public repository at the time of publication . Footnote 68 The European Commission Footnote 69 and cOAlition S , an international consortium of research funding organizations, recommend or impose OA policies to ensure that the research work they support is shared fully and immediately. Footnote 70 Universities and research centres are also adopting policies that impose OA mandates or right retention practices to make their researchers’ academic work immediately and openly available for scholarly communication. Footnote 71 Such policies are considered private instruments that have legal effects Footnote 72 and raise certain legal issues.

3.1.1 OA Policies as “Mandates” to Researchers

Research funders make it compulsory for researchers who accept the terms and conditions of their funding to publish in OA. In such cases, OA is a legal duty for the researcher, and should they fail to comply with that obligation and publish articles in paywalled journals, the funder may take legal action against them.

In contrast, the OA policies adopted by certain universities and research centres can be considered more controversial. Some HEIs make OA mandatory, while others’ policies serve as mere recommendations or simply guidance for their academic staff. Footnote 73 It might be argued that OA mandates are justified if researchers are employees of public universities, and their research output is publicly funded. Footnote 74 Indeed, if researchers are employees of public or private HEIs, and publish works in the course of their employment, copyright may belong to their employers, which means these institutions may be legally entitled to impose OA mandates. However, universities and research centres do not usually claim copyright of their staff’s scientific scholarly work, given the nature of their employment and the freedom of research, a right that is constitutionally protected in some countries. Footnote 75

Some academics are critical of OA policies on the grounds that they threaten to inhibit scholarly publishing and, as a result, reduce an author’s academic freedom to publish in top journals. Footnote 76 Yet, as discussed, the right to decide on the commercial exploitation of research articles is not based on researchers’ academic freedom but rather on their intellectual property. Footnote 77 Copyright gives authors the freedom to decide whether or not they publish their scientific contributions, in which journal they wish to publish and whether or not they wish to make their work publicly available. For this reason, it has been noted that OA mandates imply appropriation of the researchers’ copyright. Footnote 78

Certainly, as long as HEIs and research centres are not copyright holders of their academic staff’s work, they are not entitled to impose OA mandates or right retention practices. They may, however, recommend that their staff comply with the funder’s OA mandates and encourage them to publish in OA or to make their pre-print publications available for scholarly communication.

3.1.2 Conflicts Between OA Policies and Authors’ Publishing Agreements

A relevant legal question arising in relation to OA policies is their effect on agreements entered into between researchers and publishers. Scholars complain that OA policies increase the administrative burden on them, as they are left to negotiate an increasingly complex copyright landscape with multiple interacting licenses. Footnote 79 Problems manifest themselves when a researcher assigns an exclusive license to a commercial publisher to use an article, but the same article is covered by a prior non-exclusive scholarly communications license granted by the author to the institution, resulting from the university’s OA policy. In such circumstances, is the publisher entitled to prevent the author from depositing the article in the repository and enforce an embargo?

The answer to this question is to be found in national legislation and needs to be considered from the perspectives of both copyright and contract law. According to some national copyright laws, a prior license granted by the author to the institution prevails over the exclusive license entered into later with the publisher. Section 33 of the German Copyright Act specifically regulates the effect of licenses granted subsequently on the same work. This provision is applied when there is conflict between subsequent licenses, Footnote 80 and implies that a prior non-exclusive license to use a work should prevail over an exclusive right on the same work granted later. Footnote 81 A similar rule is found in Art. 14.6 of the Spanish Copyright Act. Footnote 82 Indeed, various decisions of the Spanish Supreme Court have recognized that prior licenses should prevail if the author grants successive licenses on the same work. Footnote 83

Contract law is relevant for determining the liability of an author in such cases. By entering into an exclusive publishing license agreement, the author guarantees that the publisher retains the right to use the article, so the author does not come into conflict with the publisher’s business. Footnote 84 A prior non-exclusive license for scholarly communication will damage the publisher’s exploitation in the case of paywalled articles with an embargo. Clearly, publishers have no interest in publishing content that is already publicly available. Therefore, when entering into a publishing license agreement, the author has a legal duty to give notice to the publisher of any prior non-exclusive license with the institution.

Contract law protects the publisher that acts in good faith for valuable consideration and without having received notice of a prior non-exclusive license. According to UK legislation, in the case of exclusive copyright licenses, prior subsisting licenses are binding except for bona fide purchasers that did not receive notice. Footnote 85 In this case, UK legislation empowers the publisher with an exclusive right, which is deemed binding vis-à-vis any prior licenses. Therefore, if the publisher is not given notice of the prior license, it will be entitled to publish the article and expect the same outcome as if prior non-contractual licenses did not exist; thus, the publisher could prevent the university from using the article for scholarly communication until the embargo period expires. Moreover, the publisher could sue the author for breaking a warranty and claim the loss suffered as a result of not having been given notice of the prior license. Footnote 86 A breach of contract gives rise to action for damages, whether the term breached is a condition, a warranty, or an innominate term. Footnote 87 Thus, the publisher could claim the gain of which it had been deprived, Footnote 88 that is, the APC it would have charged if the article were published in OA.

For all these reasons, the publishers’ response to the growth and development of institutional OA polices based on rights retention has so far been limited and inconsistent. Footnote 89 Publishers see zero-embargo OA policies as undermining their gold OA business, and the largest commercial European publishers still impose embargoes on making self-archived publications openly available. Footnote 90

HEI and research centre policies may become an effective instrument for making academics aware of their responsibilities towards funders and of the advantages of making their research output publicly available. However, at the same time, HEIs and research centres need to respect the decisions that their academic staff make regarding OA publishing. The majority of academic authors still prefer to publish their articles in prestigious high-quality journals, regardless of the fact that they cannot make them publicly available. Footnote 91

3.2 Changes in Copyright Legislation

Some European countries recently adopted legislative initiatives to provide academic authors with a Secondary Publication Right (SPR), which enables them to make their published contributions publicly available on the condition that certain requirements are met. In 2013, Germany amended its copyright law, introducing the SPR in the section governing the transfer of author’s rights. Footnote 92 The same initiative was subsequently adopted by the Netherlands and Austria, which both amended their copyright laws in 2015. Footnote 93 In 2016, France recognized the SPR in its Code of Science Law, Footnote 94 and Belgium introduced it in its Code of Economic Law in 2018. Footnote 95 Despite marked differences between these five national iterations of the SPR, they all adhere to the same basic structure: (1) the secondary publishing right is only granted to authors of scientific contributions (published primarily in journals); (2) the research should be, at least partly, publicly funded; (3) the right only allows the author to make the “accepted manuscript” available to the public; and (4) an embargo period must be respected. Footnote 96 Finally, the SPR is unwaivable and inalienable, so the author retains this right, regardless of any transfer of rights to publishers, and cannot renounce it.

The SPR was first formulated by a German jurist as a moral right of academic authors; hence its inalienable nature. Footnote 97 However, it has been argued that the SPR is nothing more than a copyright limitation for publishers in disguise, with weak justifications, that would unduly prevent application of the three-step test to copyright limitations contained in Art. 13 TRIPS. Footnote 98 This article requires that copyright limitations or exceptions be limited to certain special cases that do not conflict with normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the right holder.

The embargo requirement to be met for exercising an SPR certainly looks like a copyright limitation. As observed, the basic idea underlying embargoes in copyright limitations is to ensure normal exploitation of a work. Footnote 99 The same idea underpins restricting the SPR to the “accepted manuscript”, that is to say the manuscript approved by the author for publication following peer review as opposed to the final typeset published version(“Version of Record”). The SPR takes sufficient account of the interests of scientific publishing firms, Footnote 100 which is a sign that national legislators formulated the SPR with a view to balancing researchers’ interests in publishing in OA with publishers’ investments.

Recognition of the SPR has not proved to be especially effective for the expansion of OA in those European countries that have adopted it. According to a 2021 study entitled “Open Access in Europe: a National and Regional Comparison”, the most “open” areas in Europe are the UK and the Scandinavian countries, owing to strong incentives from public agencies and the fact that several universities have adopted effective OA policies with dedicated staff and funds. Footnote 101

Harmonizing the SPR as a copyright exception or limitation at EU level has also been suggested. Footnote 102 However, this would be problematic because any legislative initiative to foster OA needs to balance all the interests at stake. If the SPR is formulated in such a way that it can only be exercised after an embargo, and it continues to be limited to “accepted manuscripts” to assure the publishers’ investment, the SPR is doomed to fail as a mechanism for expanding OA to scientific publishing. Embargoes frustrate researchers in their efforts at keeping up to date with the latest publications in their field; and researchers are not especially enthused by the use of their “accepted manuscript”, Footnote 103 because actual publication in a journal is critical for achieving a reliable, final, typeset, scholarly record. Footnote 104 Additionally, accepted manuscripts are deposited in vast institutional repositories that contain all kinds of academic output from the scholarly community (e.g. unpublished articles, conference papers, thesis, dissertations), which are not systematically organized and do not differentiate publications according to quality, Footnote 105 as a journal would normally do.

In short, copyright law is not the best instrument for fostering universal OA. When amending copyright law, the legislator must consider all the interests at stake: not only the concern of funders and researchers to expand access to scientific knowledge in the interests of society, but also the legitimate interest of publishers in profiting from their investments. In contrast, agreements between publishers and research institutions might provide a negotiated solution for the implementation of universal OA.

3.3 New “Read and Publish” Agreements

OA is also remodelling publishing agreements and changing the business of academic publishing. Subscription licenses, traditionally offered by publishers to universities or research institutions, to grant access to scientific journals, are being transformed into new “Read and Publish” (R&P) agreements or “transformative agreements” (TAs). By means of these R&P agreements, publishers grant universities the right to access, copy and download paywalled articles from their journals, and the right to publish a certain number of articles in their commercial journals in OA.

R&P agreements emerged as a result of a report published by the Max Planck Society Digital Library in 2015, which demonstrated that expenditure on subscriptions to scientific journals could be redirected and re-invested into OA business models to pay for APCs. Footnote 106 As such, these new agreements are not supposed to add APCs to subscription fees, but rather to gradually replace subscription income with that generated by APCs for OA publishing. Footnote 107 According to the ESAC Initiative (Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges), these new agreements will allow former subscription expenditure to be repurposed to support the OA publishing of the negotiating institutions’ authors, thereby gradually and definitively transforming the business model that underpins scholarly journal publishing from one based on toll access (subscription) to one in which publishers are paid a fair price for their OA publishing services. Footnote 108

The first R&P agreements were entered into between commercial publishers and institutions in 2018, and there has been a gradual increase in the number of agreements implemented since 2020. Footnote 109 Most have been signed between the major publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Walter de Gruyter, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, etc.) and the libraries or consortia libraries of HEIs and research centres.

The primary innovation of R&P agreements lies in the clause referring to subscription fees and in the number of APCs included in the contract. Publishing fees are amalgamated with subscription fees, and depend on the number of researchers employed by an institution and the total number of articles they seek to publish in OA journals. For instance, the R&P agreement entered into between the Spanish National Research Council and Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2020 shows that the former will pay OUP almost EUR 1 million over five years to secure access to their journals and to publish 358 OA articles (with 24% of the fee corresponding to reading and 76% to publishing, and an APC of EUR 2,123 per article). Footnote 110 Although R&P agreements are not supposed to increase the cost of subscription licenses, they are associated with higher costs than traditional read-only subscriptions. Footnote 111 Additionally, in some cases, R&P agreements can result in overpayment (if the number of articles accepted for publication falls short of the agreed number) or under-availability (if some of the articles accepted for publication fall outside the bulk-sum payment and have to be covered separately). Footnote 112

R&P agreements also oblige “eligible authors”, whose articles are accepted for OA publication, to transfer their exclusive rights to publishers. Authors’ agreements are separately negotiated with the publishers. Footnote 113 Under these OA publishing agreements, the author grants the publisher an exclusive license, and the publisher states the Creative Commons License under which the article will be made publicly available. Footnote 114 The author receives no payment from the publisher, but the exclusive transfer of rights is justified as the article will be publicly available; hence, authors’ rights retention for scholarly communication is pointless.

Agreements between commercial publishers and institutions may be the best mechanism for providing a sustainable business model for OA, provided they rely on principles of party autonomy and contractual freedom. However, R&P agreements present the typical anomalies of contracts entered into between commercial publishers and HEIs or research centres. Commercial publishers impose high fees on these institutions to read and publish in OA, bundle all their journals into one single R&P agreement, and typically impose their own legal jurisdiction as the applicable law governing their contracts. Footnote 115 Determining which law applies to these agreements is a key issue, as US and UK copyright law tend to favour publishers’ commercial interests and permit the assignment of exclusive transfers of rights, whereas in civil jurisdictions the transfer of author’s rights is construed in favour of the author. Footnote 116

More importantly, the future of R&P agreements remains uncertain for publishers. If more institutions shift towards OA embedded in transformative agreements, the share of OA will dramatically increase. As a result, fewer research-oriented institutions will be tempted to cancel their subscriptions, reducing the journals’ income in the process. Footnote 117 The highest ranked universities will overpay APCs Footnote 118 compared to institutions with a lower publication output. Footnote 119 In the case of consortia, this behaviour may unbalance internal agreements on cost distribution. Footnote 120 Moreover R&P agreements will prove extremely challenging for smaller publishers and a few isolated journals.

4 Economic and Competition Law Issues Involved in Open Access Publishing

The journal publishing market is a complex, dynamic system, with journals constantly switching publishing houses, and publishing houses acquiring or merging with their competitors. Footnote 121 As a result of these dynamics, five big commercial publishers represent more than half the market for scholarly journals today. Footnote 122 These “big five” publish most of the high impact factor journals and, indeed, the majority of scientific papers. Footnote 123 This high degree of concentration of ownership of scientific journals has led to asymmetry in negotiating powers between research institutions and publishers. Thus, a publisher that owns a journal with a high impact factor enjoys a strong market position vis-à-vis not only researchers but also libraries. Footnote 124

The concentrated nature of the academic publishing market – including both OA and toll access journals – potentially offers top publishing companies a monopoly. Footnote 125 Indeed, in 2018, the European University Association (EUA) issued a statement expressing its concern about possible irregularities relating to pricing and market conditions in the research publishing sector. Their primary objections to the “big five” academic publishers were, first, their lack of transparency when pricing journal subscriptions and, second, their bundling of a large number of academic journals into one single agreement (a so-called “big deal”). Footnote 126

Academic publishers charge extremely high prices for subscriptions to individual journals, making it less attractive or nearly impossible to buy only the most interesting journals and skip the others. This means that libraries are left buying very large bundles, including journals that they might not actually be interested in. Additionally, the pricing structure for journal subscriptions and the fees for OA publishing remain quite obscure. The average APC for a journal article is, at present, USD 2,987, but there is tremendous variation in APCs across journals, which obviously cannot be explained by costs alone. Footnote 127 As OA publishing advances, subscriptions will gradually disappear, which suggests that APCs are being used by commercial publishers in lieu of subscription fees. If, eventually, universal OA is attained, subscriptions and book sales will cease and publishers will only charge once for publishing a scientific article or book in OA. However, as things currently stand, publishers’ income is based on thousands of subscriptions for the same journals and thousands of sales of the same book. Excessively high pricing of APCs and BPCs may become a potential risk in the OA publishing market.

Competition law may well have a key role to play in correcting the dominant practices of academic publishers in the publishing market. In the case of the EU market, Art. 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of European Union (TFEU) prohibits abuse by dominant firms, and Art. 102(a) TFEU lists as examples of abusive conduct “directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions”. Importantly, Art. 102 TFEU applies when one undertaking has a “dominant” position or where two or more undertakings are “collectively dominant”. Footnote 128 This could be considered the case of the “big five” commercial publishers that account for more than 50% of the market share for scholarly journals.

Difficulties may be encountered when seeking to determine whether the largest commercial academic publishers are indeed collectively abusing a dominant market position. According to the CJEU’s decision in the case of Compagnie Maritime Belge Transports and Others v. Commission , a finding that two or more undertakings hold a collective dominant position must, in principle, “proceed upon an economic assessment of the position on the relevant market of the undertakings concerned”. Footnote 129 Thus, the first step in ascertaining whether an undertaking or group of undertakings exercises a dominant position is to define the relevant market in which they compete. According to the EU Commission, obtaining this definition requires defining both the product market and the geographic markets , where the relevant product market comprises all products or services regarded as interchangeable or substitutable by the consumer by reason of their characteristics, prices and intended use. Footnote 130 In the case of academic publishers, the relevant market might be deemed to comprise the publishing market of academic journals and periodicals. However, this is highly controversial, because if the product market is drawn narrowly, with relatively few competing products, it is much more likely that an undertaking will be found to be dominant. Footnote 131 As for the geographic market, this is not readily defined for commercial scientific publishers, given that the large publishing houses have been transformed into digital platforms with multi-sided markets. Footnote 132

Yet, as discussed, an excessive pricing ruling is possible in any market, not only where firms abuse their dominant market positions. Footnote 133 Excessive pricing and bundling can also be considered a reflection of the publishers’ control over the agreements entered into with research institutions. Thus, at what point can a price be deemed excessive? There is no single adequate method for evaluating an excessive price, but cost-benefit balancing tests may help to chart the interface of competition and intellectual property for a particular commercial practice. Footnote 134 Furthermore, the CJEU has ruled that a price can be “objectively” determined excessive by “making a comparison between the selling price of the product in question and its cost of production, which would disclose the amount of the profit margin”. Footnote 135

However, the current lack of transparency on the part of publishers regarding their article publishing costs hinders any assessment as to whether their costs and profits are well balanced. In the past, publishers had to invest in technology to transform articles and books into publishable forms and guarantee the print distribution, but digital publishing technologies have reduced such costs, especially in the case of online journals. Footnote 136 Nevertheless, commercial publishers have raised journal prices over the last 30 years, placing substantial pressure on library budgets. Footnote 137 Publishers claim these price hikes are justified by their need to invest in journal management and development and in expensive digital technology so they can build their databases and implement new publishing platforms. Footnote 138 They also seek to justify them on the grounds of the expertise they provide in improving academic content, which ensures the product quality of their journals: manuscripts submitted to a journal are assessed and selected by the journals’ editors, revised by peer reviewers, and proofread to ensure the manuscript includes all revisions and complies with style guides.

Yet, journal editors and peer reviewers are qualified members of the academic community, who are not usually paid for their services by the publishing companies. Footnote 139 Today, the typical academic journal receives all its content for free; writing, editing, reviewing, and all other processes related to knowledge production are conducted by academics and researchers, and indirectly paid for by their respective institutions. Footnote 140 Publishers’ contributions, which include proofing amendments, typesetting, language editing and publishing, can be done with very little material investment. For this reason, it has been suggested that academia might give some consideration to bringing more scholarly publishing functions in-house, instead of paying high fees to allow their researchers to read the work they themselves have done. Footnote 141

Obviously, neither journal subscriptions nor APCs or BPCs address solely the recouping of the cost of editorial input: they also serve to make profit. Indeed, various authors criticize the “black box” of academic publishing costs for charging excessively and for the disproportionate profit margins of around 40%. Footnote 142 All the signs are that large academic publishers are imposing abusive fees and bundling practices on research institutions, and that the sector should be subject to greater scrutiny under competition law. OA publishing could be an opportunity to adjust publishers’ income by setting fair APCs and BPCs that strike a better balance between their costs and profits.

5 Conclusion

The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to ensure that commercial publishers profit from disseminating the results of scholarly research. This is achieved by imposing copyright licenses on every copy, distribution, or further communication of their publications. OA publishing represents a significant change to this system, as publishers only charge a fee for their services, that is to say they make scholarly articles and books freely available from their journals and databases with virtually no copyright restrictions. If universal OA is achieved, journal subscriptions and book sales will cease, and publishers’ income will be based solely on a fee charged for each article and book published in OA.

The role of copyright in the development of OA scholarly publishing is limited, given that the main issue is how an OA system can be implemented financially; above all, it remains to be seen who will pay the commercial publishers, university presses and learned societies for OA publishing, and how fair publishing fees will be fixed.

Publishers have contributed to organizing and improving research publications, producing highly specialized journals over the last two centuries. They continue to play a vital role in scientific publishing. The path towards OA clearly has to be negotiated with these publishers, rather than restricting publishers’ rights or imposing compulsory licenses on them. Agreements between commercial publishers and institutions would constitute the most appropriate legal instrument in the search for a sustainable business model for OA, provided that those agreements include principles of party autonomy and contractual freedom to set fair publishing fees. In this new publishing market, competition law can play a key role in developing a model for sustainable universal OA.

Shaheed ( 2014 ), p. 17.

Suber ( 2012 ), p. 4.

Bammel ( 2014 ), p. 339.

The EU Research and Innovation Program Horizon (2021–2027) does not cover APCs in the case of subscription journals; Commission Staff Working Document, Impact Assessment Accompanying the document Proposals for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing Horizon Europe , Brussels, 7-6-2018, SWD (2018) 307 final, part 2/3, p. 106.

See the statement made by STM Publishers (Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) on embargo-free OA in repositories: https://www.stm-assoc.org/rightsretentionstrategy/ .

Suber ( 2012 ), p. 130.

Willinsky ( 2009 ), p. 47.

Guibault ( 2011 ), p. 160.

Shavell ( 2010 ), p. 302.

Suthersanen ( 2003 ), p. 602.

Moscon ( 2015 ), p. 116.

De la Cueva and Méndez ( 2022 ), p. 11.

Willinsky ( 2022 ), p. 3.

Geiger and Jütte ( 2023 ), p. 6.

Bellia and Moscon ( 2022 ), p. 61.

Chapman ( 2009 ), p. 1.

Helfer and Austin ( 2011 ), p. 234.

Art. 27 UDHR declares that “(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he [or she] is the author”.

Plomer ( 2013 ), p. 175.

Art. 15.1 ICESCR states that “[t]he States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone: (a) To take part in cultural life; (b) To enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications; (c) To benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he [or she] is the author”.

Chapman ( 2009 ), p. 6.

Yotova and Knoppers ( 2020 ), p. 668.

Article 15.2 ICESCR states that “[t]he steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture”.

Yotova and Knoppers ( 2020 ), p. 682.

Yotova and Knoppers ( 2020 ), p. 671.

CJEU judgment of 6 October 2020 Commission v. Hungary ( Higher Education ), C-66/18 , EU:C:2020:792, para. 225.

Geiger and Jütte ( 2023 ), pp. 43–44.

Geiger and Jütte ( 2023 ), p. 44.

Senftleben ( 2022 ), p. 12.

Chapman ( 2009 ), p. 2.

See para. 12(a) of the Venice Statement “The Right to Enjoy the Benefits of Scientific Progress and its Applications”, UNESCO (Venice 2009).

Ibid para. 8.

Stichweh ( 2009 ), pp. 82–90.

“Draft Recommendation on Open Science”, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 2021, available at https://en.unesco.org/science-sustainable-future/open-science/recommendation

Ibid paras. 6 and 9.

Kohler ( 1907 ), p. 143.

See Bulletin de l’Association littéraire internationale (1883), No. 18, p. 5.

Gálvez-Behar ( 2011 ), p. 21.

Ricketson and Ginsburg ( 2006 ), p. 406.

The UK Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 establishes in Art. 1 that “[c]opyright is a property right which subsists in accordance with this Part in the following descriptions of work – (a) original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works”, the French Code de la Propriété Intellectuelle (Loi Nº 92-597 of July 1992) states in Art. L.111-1 that “[t]he author of a work of the mind shall enjoy in that work, by the sole fact of its creation, an exclusive intangible property right that is enforceable against all persons”, and Art L.112-2 considers “works of the mind within the meaning of this Code: 1. Books, pamphlets and other literary, artistic and scientific writings ”. [emphasis added]

The German Copyright Act of 9 September 1965 states in Sec. 1 that “[t]he authors of works in the literary, scientific and artistic domain enjoy protection for their works in accordance with this Act” and the Spanish Copyright Act of 1996 declares in Art. 1 “[t]he intellectual property in a literary, artistic or scientific work shall belong to the author thereof by virtue of the sole act of its creation”. [emphasis added]

Loewenheim and Leistner ( 2020 ), p.69.

Bercovitz Rodriguez-Cano ( 2017 ), p. 159.

Quaedvlieg ( 2016 ), p. 654.

CJEU judgment of 1 December 2011 Painer v. Standard Verlags GmbH , C-145/10, EU:C:2011:798, paras. 88-89.

Galvez-Behar ( 2011 ), p. 90.

Salitskaya ( 2019 ) , p. 464.

Bently and Biron ( 2014 ), p. 242.

Casas ( 2009 ), p. 102.

See Art. 7 of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases.

Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society.

Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market and amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC.

See Art. 5(3).(a) ISD.

Strowel and Ducato ( 2021 ), p. 303.

Geiger and Jütte ( 2023 ), pp. 54–55.

Geiger and Jütte ( 2023 ), pp. 53–54, and Angelopoulos ( 2022 ), p. 55.

See European Commission (2016), Commission Staff Working Document , Impact Assessment on the modernisation of EU copyright rules, Part I, Brussels, 14.9.2016 SWD (2016) 301 final, p. 104.

Senftleben ( 2022 ), p. 37.

See Art. 3 DSMD.

See Recital 10 DSMD.

Strowel and Ducato ( 2021 ), p. 301.

Griffiths et al. ( 2022 ), p. 13.

The Finch Report was drafted by a committee set up by the UK government to expand access to research publications, especially as regards publicly funded research. Available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finch_Group_report.pdf .

United Kingdom research and innovation OA policy 2022, 3 https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy/ .

Art. 37(2) of Ley 14/2011 de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Innovación (Spanish Law 14/2011 on Science, Technology, and Innovation).

Recital 5 of Commission Recommendation (EU) 2018/790 of 25 April 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32018H0790

See https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/principles-and-implementation/ .

See SPARC Europe, “Opening Knowledge, Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe in 2023”, p. 2. Available at https://sparceurope.org/opening-knowledge/ .

Bellia and Moscon ( 2022 ), p. 72.

In the UK, a growing number of HEIs have adopted the Scholarly Communications Licence, which allows authors to grant the university a non-exclusive license to make their accepted manuscript available without delay through the university’s OA repositories under the terms of a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC). Cf . Baldwin and Pinfield ( 2018 ) p. 3 for a more detailed discussion of UK HEIs.

Angelopoulos ( 2022 ), p. 33.

Bellia and Moscon ( 2022 ), pp. 64–67.

Baldwin and Pinfield ( 2018 ) p.7 refer to UK academics. In Germany, Roland Reuß, professor of literary studies at the University of Heidelberg, criticized the German government proposal to make OA mandatory for all publicly funded research, ( see http://www.textkritik.de/digitalia/con_crema.htm ), and Jeffrey Beall, in the US, considers that a social movement that needs mandates to work is doomed to fail, Beall ( 2013 ), p. 594.

Moscon ( 2015 ), p. 107.

See , e.g. , Anderson, “cOAlition S’s Rights Confiscation Strategy Continues”, The Scholarly Kitchen, 20 July 2020, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/07/20/coalition-ss-rights-confiscation-strategy-continues/ .

Khoo ( 2021 ), p. 6.

Peifer and Ohly ( 2020 ), p. 835.

Wandtke ( 2010 ), p. 185.

Rodríguez Tapia ( 1992 ), p. 294.

Cavanillas ( 2017 ), p. 930.

Owen ( 2013 ), p. 247.

Caddick et al. ( 2021 ), p. 488.

According to Art. 1:201(1) Principles of European Contract Law (PECL), “[e]ach party must act in accordance with good faith and fair dealing”; according to Art. 1:301(4) PECL “‘non-performance’ denotes any failure to perform an obligation under the contract, whether or not excused, and includes delayed performance, defective performance, and failure to co-operate in order to give full effect to the contract ”. [emphasis added]

McKendrick ( 2021 ), p. 392.

Art 9: 502 PECL states that “[t]he general measure of damages is such sum as will put the aggrieved party as nearly as possible into the position in which it would have been if the contract had been duly performed. Such damages cover the loss which the aggrieved party has suffered and the gain of which it has been deprived”.

Cf. SPARC Europe, “Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe in 2023” (Note 71) p. 17.

Cf. SPARC Europe, “Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe in 2023” (Note 71), p. 80.

De Castro ( 2020 ), p. 4.

See Art. 25fa Dutch Copyright Act ( Staatsblad 2015, p. 258), Art. 37(a) Austrian Federal Law on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works and Related Rights ( Bundesgesetzblatt Teil I , No. 99/2015).

Art. 30 of Loi, n. 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique [Law No. 2016-1321 of 7 October 2016 for a Digital France] ( JORF , Journal officiel «Lois et Décrets», No. 0235 of 8 October 2016).

Art. 29 of the Law on Miscellaneous Economic Provisions of 30 July 2018] ( Belgisch Staatsblad No. 209, p. 68691)

Angelopoulos ( 2022 ), pp. 33–35.

Hansen ( 2005 ), pp. 378–388, p. 379.

Quaedvlieg ( 2016 ), p. 655.

Senftleben ( 2014 ), p. 10.

Visser ( 2015 ), p. 878.

Maddi et al. ( 2021 ), p. 3137.

On the difficulties of adopting SPR as an EU copyright exception, cf . Angelopolus (2022), pp. 37–53.

May ( 2020 ), p. 126.

Cf. SPARC Europe, “Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe in 2023”, (Note 71), p. 80.

Bell ( 2014 ), p. 144.

Schimmer et al. ( 2015 ), p. 5.

Szprot et al. (2021), p. 10.

See https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/ . The ESAC initiative was established in 2014 to promote workflow efficiencies and library-driven standards in the management of OA article processing charges.

See the registry of TAs at https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry/ .

The Spanish National Research Council comprises some 100 research institutes in disciplines that include medicine, chemistry, physics, and biology. The R&P agreement with OUP can be consulted at https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry/oxf2020csic/ . At present, the average APC per article is EUR 2,300. Cf . Borrego et al. ( 2021 ), p. 225.

Anders et al. ( 2021 ), p. 132.

Szprot et al. ( 2021 ), p. 51.

See clause 5.2.e of the Wiley “Read and Publish” framework agreement with the Spanish Conference of University Chancellors (CRUE) available at https://www.crue.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/MoU-WILEY.pdf .

See , for Elsevier’s copyright overview and authors rights on exclusive license for publishing in OA https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards/copyright#0-overview .

English law is recognized as the governing law in the R&P agreement between the Spanish National Research Council and Oxford University Press (available at https://esac-initiative.org/about/transformative-agreements/agreement-registry/oxf2020csic/ ) and in the R&P agreement between the University of Barcelona and Cambridge Law Review. In contrast, the general collaboration agreement between Springer and CRUE covering R&P agreements between Springer and Spanish Universities recognizes Spanish law as the governing law, available at https://www.crue.org/proyecto/acuerdos-con-editoriales/ .

Westkamp ( 2022 ), p. 1044.

Bently ( 2021 ), p. 30.

Asai ( 2021 ) p. 32.

Mueller-Langer and Scheufen ( 2013 ), p. 365.

Borrego et al. ( 2021 ), p. 219.

Larivière et al. ( 2015 ), p. 3.

The “big five” are Elsevier (2,928 journals), Springer (2,920 journals), Taylor & Francis (2,508 journals), Wiley (1,607 journals) and SAGE (1,151 journals). See https://wordsrated.com/academic-publishers-statistics/ .

Eger and Scheufen ( 2018 ), p. 121.

Eger and Scheufen ( 2018 ), p. 17.

Puehringer et al. ( 2021 ), p. 2.

The EUA represents 800 universities across Europe and 33 National Rectors’ Conferences. The EUA’s statement entitled “The lack of transparency and competition in the academic publishing market in Europe and beyond” is available at https://eua.eu/news/188:scholarly-publishing-eua-asks-european-commission-to-investigate-lack-of-competition.html .

Budzinski et al. ( 2020 ), pp. 2185 and 2203.

Whish and Bailey ( 2015 ), p. 187.

CJEU judgment of 16 March 2000 Compagnie Maritime Belge Transports and Others v. Commission, Case C-395/96 ECLI:EU:2000:132, para. 38.

See EU Commission Draft of the “Communication from the Commission: Commission Notice on the definition of the relevant market for the purposes of Union competition law”, pp. 10–11, available at https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6528 .

Macculloch and Rodger ( 2021 ), p. 228.

Business Models and Market Structure within the Scholarly Communications Sector, International Science Council, p. 6. Available at https://council.science/publications/business-models/ .

McMahon ( 2023 ), p. 139.

Flynn ( 2010 ), p.150.

CJEU judgment of 14 February 1978 United Brands Co v. Commission , Case C-27/76, ECLI:EU:C:1978:22, para. 251.

May ( 2020 ), p. 122.

See , Business Models and Market Structure within the Scholarly Communications Sector, International Science Council, September 2020, pp. 10–16, available at https://council.science/publications/business-models/ .

Michael et al. (2016), p. 1404.

Litman ( 2006 ), p. 794.

Smith ( 2018 ), p. 1186; Budzinski et al. ( 2020 ), p. 2185.

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