Skip to Main Content

Mechanical Engineering

Web resources and Open Access

Open Access (OA) is free, unrestricted online access to research outputs.

Research is published in journals and other scholarly forms to ensure that the results are recorded and communicated to the wider community. The Library subscribes to many of these scholarly formats to provide its staff and students with access to the information they need. However, these (paid-for) ways of publishing often do not reach the whole of the research community so some, not all, research is published as Open Access.

This page offers links to useful sources of Open Access research, tools to help discover OA material during web searches, and other useful resources freely available on the web.

 

Institutional Repositories

Many institutions (including Bristol) collect peer-reviewed author manuscripts and pre-prints from their academics and put them into digital repositories. This can provide easy open access to high quality scientific publications. You can find repositories and search their contents using the OpenDOAR directory. The University of Bristol's digital repository is Explore Bristol Research.

What is Open Access?

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine that provides a broad search of scholarly literature. It covers multiple disciplines and sources.

Using Google Scholar off campus

To get full-text links in your Google Scholar results, you must first tell Google Scholar that you have access to the University of Bristol library subscriptions by

  • Selecting Settings from the top of the home page
  • Selecting Library Links
  • Searching for the University of Bristol and selecting it from the list
  • Saving your settings

You will now see 'Get It @ Bristol Univ' links next to items in your Google Scholar results that you can use to access the full-text provided by library subscriptions.