This training outlines various freely available discovery tools and platforms to locate theses and dissertations, freely available journal articles, books, images, newspapers, statistics and datasets, patents, etc.
By the end of this training, learners should:
- Be familiar with various discovery platforms and subject repositories to locate content in open access and know their functionalities.
- Know how to find open access versions of publications.
Training Outline:
- Disciplinary/subject repositories such as PubMed Central and Europe PMC (Biomedical and Life Sciences), arXiv (Physics, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics), Humanities Commons (Humanities), etc.
- Discovery platforms to locate theses and dissertations, freely available journal articles, books, images, newspapers, statistics, datasets, such as Open Access Button, BASE, CORE, OATD, DART Europe, OpenAIRE Explore, GoTRIPLE, re3data, The Lens.
- Using AI based literature review tools: potential and limitations.
- Websites to find images, such as Wikimedia Commons, Pixabay, etc.
- Browser extensions to find open access articles, such Unpaywall, Open Access Button, Google Scholar Button, CORE Discovery, Kopernio; using Zotero to find open access articles thanks to integration with Unpaywall.
Resources for facilitators and learners
Videos, examples of presentations, practical exercises and tip sheets:
- Julia Barrett. “Freely Available Tools and Resources for your Research”, University College Dublin.
- Joe Mcarthur. “Delivering Open Access content" [download], Open Access Button.
- Sample Exercises for practising DART Europe, BASE, Registry of Research Data Repositories and the Creative Commons Image Portal [download]
- “How can I get access to the article I need”, EIFL clickable tip sheet.
- “AI-Driven Search Engines: A Comparative Study”, SLA Europe.
- Tay, Aaron. ‘List of Academic Search Engines That Use Large Language Models for Generative Answers Using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)’. Aaron Tay’s Musings about Librarianship.