Open Access Social Work: Home

This guide has been created to assist PSU School of Social Work alumni and other practicing social workers across Oregon in accessing scholarly research after they have left their university.

The guide is organized by topic areas:

• Search for Open Access Articles: Publicly available databases to search for open access articles
• Open Access Finding Tools: Browser extensions for retrieving the OA version of an article if available
• General Social Work 
• Addictions
• Child Welfare 
• Evidence-Based Practice
• Mental Health
• Social Justice/Community Practice

Membership to the Portland State Alumni Association is now free! An Alumni Association card provides you with:  

• checkout privileges for 5 books at a time (3 weeks with 1 renewal)

You also have on-site access to databases and computers. Learn more about alumni access to the Library.

Sign up for an alumni membership card.

Answerland is a reference service for every Oregonian, and it's staffed by librarians! Online chat reference is available 24/7. 

• Answerland chat

Oregon State Library funds database access across all public libraries in the state.

Directory of public libraries in Oregon

If you have a contract with the State of Oregon, you might be eligible for an account with the Oregon State Library that allows remote access to databases and full text articles.

Please contact the Oregon State Library Reference Hotline at (503) 378-8800 to find out if you are eligible for an account.

Open Access is a term used to represent both an idea, that the results of publicly funded research be freely available, and a movement, characterized by various initiatives to make published scholarly literature freely available on the web. More...

Here's a brief introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber.

An embargo is an access restriction that publishers sometimes put on a journal. The embargo will allow only free access to journal content that is older than the embargo period (often 6, 12, or 18 months).