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Open Access Collections

Open Access refers to scholarly literature (books, journals, conference proceedings, etc.) that are available online and free of charge. Open access is entirely consistent with the highest standards of quality, and all the major open access initiatives insist on the importance of peer review. Copyright holders control the right to permit open access and have the right to be properly acknowledged. The University of Galway is committed to increase Open Access to our research publications. Read about Open Publishing at the University of Galway.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are free digital resources used in the context of teaching and learning that have been released by the copyright holder under an open licence permitting their use and re-purposing by others. More about Open Educational Resources.


Find Open Access Publications and Open Educational Resources

The Library strives to make open access publications and open educational resources discoverable and accessible via our library catalogue. You can access a variety of open access items via a search of the library catalogue.

Search the Library Catalogue for a comprehensive list of open access resources.

You can also search by topic or subject keywords and then refine the results to open access resources.

University of Galway Research Repository is the digital collection of open access scholarly publications from University of Galway. Research Repository collects, preserves and makes freely available scholarly communication, including peer-reviewed articles, working papers, and conference papers created by University of Galway researchers.

You can also locate open access publications direct from publishers in open access journals, through directories of open access content, and in archives and repositories.

Use the links below to find open access scholarly publications from a wide range of sources. These are only a small sample of open access collections and directories.


Popular Open Access Directories

  • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): DOAB indexes over 1,300 peer reviewed books from 46 publishers
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): DOAJ is a service that provides access to quality controlled Open Access Journals. It indexes over 8,800 journals and contains over 1 million searchable articles.
  • OAIster: OAIster is a union catalogue of millions of records, representing free digital resources from over 1,000 open access collections worldwide
  • OpenDOAR Search: The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories