Open Access Social Work: Search for Open Access Articles

Resources for PSU SSW alumni and practicing social workers in Oregon.

Resources for Finding and Accessing Open Access Articles

There are a few primary resources to search for open access articles relevant to social work: Google Scholar, ERIC, and PubMed.

Unpaywall and the Open Access Button are browser extensions that search for an open access version of the article. You can also search Open Access Button's website by article title.

Google Scholar primarily searches the following: academic publisher websites, Google books, institutional repositories and .edu sites, .gov sites

ERIC is a federally supported database of education-related articles.

PubMed is a federally supported database of health-sciences related articles, including psychology, psychiatry, and public health. PubMed Central is a subset of PubMed and is composed of all open access articles.

Unpaywall and Open Access Button

Unpaywall
Tool providing access to open access versions of content that have a digital object identifier (DOI). If there's an open access version of the article, the oaDOI URL will send you there, instead of the publisher paywall page.
Open Access Button
In addition to the browser extension, this tool can also be searched at the home page using: DOI, URL, or article title.

Search Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches the academic, scholarly Web for peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles. If the item is freely available, you will often seen a PDF link on the right.