Free information resources

Getting access to scientific articles and books, as well as other scientific sources is challenging when you’re no longer a student. As a KTH student, you can use KTH subscriptions for journals and e-book packages. After graduating, those are no longer available to you. But the open access movement is aiming to improve access to scientific literature. Open access means publishing scientific literature online with free access for everyone. Learn more about Open access in the video below.

Video about open access (2:59 min)

View the video with transcript in KTH Play

Resources where you can find open access material

There are several databases and archives where you can search for openly available material. In order to only see the freely available material you often need to use some kind of filter function. Below on this page we go through how you can find freely available material in some useful resources.

Open access in Google Scholar 

Google Scholar is Google’s search tool for scholarly material. You can search just as with Google, but the search results will be scientific articles and books, as well as things on university websites and repositories. Your search results can be available open access as well as behind paywalls. Google scholar can be a useful tool to find free versions of a document. 

Video about open access in Google Scholar (3:50 min)

View the video with transcript in KTH Play

Open access in The Lens

If you prefer a more advanced search interface than Google Scholar, for example if you want to do a structured search, you can use the search tool the Lens. Searching with the Lens will help you find scientific articles and patent documents. In the video about the Lens you can learn more about how to use the database.

Video about open access in The Lens (3:11 min)

View the video with transcript in KTH Play

Open access in Pubmed

Pubmed is a big biomedical database which can be useful to those of you who study or work in the field of biotechnology, medical technology or health and technology. It contains material behind paywalls as well as a lot of open access material. In the video below, we will show you how to find this freely available material.

View the video with transcipt in KTH Play 

Learn more about open access

If you want to learn more about open access the National Library of Sweden has created a video series which you find here.  

For those of you who are researchers at KTH and want to learn more about how to publish open access you can read more on the library's page about open access publishing.

You can also learn more about open access in the web course about open access and data management. The target group for the course is primarily doctoral students or researchers. Click on the link below to access the course in the Canvas learning platform.

Course in Canvas about Open Science and Research Data Management

Tools for finding open access articles

The following tools may come in handy if you are looking for a specific article but can’t get hold of the published version, with these tools you can find open access articles.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall  is an extension to the web browser Mozilla Firefox. When it is installed an icon will show up in green colour at the right hand side of your browser if there is a free version available. This icon will otherwise be gray. Clicking on the green icon will take you to the free version. Unpaywall is a service run by Impactstory , a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarly research more open, accessible and reusable.

Open Access Button 

Open Access Button  is an extension to the web browser Mozilla Firefox where you can check whether there is a free version available for a specific article. You can also enter your email address and Open Access Button will send the author(s) a request to open up the article in a legal way. Open Access Button is supported by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

EndNote Click

EndNote Click  is an extension to the web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera. This extension will identify free versions of articles, as well as check if you have access to the materials through a subscription held by your library. You can enter your user credentials for the KTH proxy server and this information will be stored within the extension for future access. Make sure to read the permissions that you need to grant before downloading. Kopernio is owned by Clarivate Analytics, the same company that produces the database Web of Science and the reference manager EndNote.

Lazy Scholar 

Lazy Scholar  is an extension to the web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Apart from identifying Open Access versions of published articles, Lazy Scholar also displays the journal rank according to CiteScore (Scopus) and altmetric scores from Altmetric.com. Lazy Scholar is a personal project by the PhD student Colby Vorland at Purdue University, US.