Gender Studies Portal

Open Access Resources

Starting Point for Gender Studies Research

What is OA?

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder."

From Peter Suber's Very brief introduction to Open Access.

Learn more : Open Access and Scholarly Publishing

OA Dissertations

These databases allow you to search specifically for OA dissertations and theses:

License

This guide has been created by Boston College Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

OA and the Social Sciences

This box contains links to social science repositories and interdisciplinary repositories with substantial social science material. It is by no means exhaustive and is intended to provide a sense of the range of types of resources available.

DOAJ Social Sciences Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals has browsable lists of journals in various areas of the social sciences, broken down by specific disciplines.
SSOAR
The Social Science Open Access Repository contains both pre- and post-print articles from a wide range of the social sciences. It is certified by the German Initiative for Networked Information (DINI). It has both English and foreign language publications.
eScholarship (University of California)
Both a repository and publishing service, eScholarship provides access to a wide range of scholarly materials from researchers associated with the UC system. Material is browsable by institution and discipline.
SSRN
The Social Science Research Network has material from across a broad range of the social sciences and is one of the largest OA repositories in the world. Coverage is also international in scope.

OA Collections

Boston College is a member of HathiTrust, a repository of millions of full text books and other materials. Download them by authenticating with your BC username and password.

Search HathiTrust content by keyword:

Search these catalogs for open access books and other media:

Internet Archive
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
OAIster

Social Sciences Data Repositories

The ARDA
The Association of Religion Data Archives is housed at Penn State University. Data cover American and international religions and draw on a wide range of sources from throughout the world.
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
The NACJD aggregates data on various criminal justice issues. It also provides training in quantitative analysis. It provides access to two programs: the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and the Terrorism and Preparedness Data Resource Center.
World Bank
The World Bank now makes all of its data (including all 7000 World Development Indicators for over 200 countries) available free of charge, a move that may well effect a decisive cultural shift in favor of open data among international organizations generally.

UNdata This link opens in a new window
UN data is all open access. Unique databases focus on topics such as crime, the environment, gender, and health. Data are sortable by country and date.

UK Data Service
A database containing open access qualitative data from the former Economic and Social Data Service and additional UK and international social, economic and population data.
Australian Social Sciences Data Archive
Maintained by the Australian National University, the ASSDA is the most comprehensive data archive in Australia. It collects data from around the Asia Pacific region and collaborates broadly with international data organizations.

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Gender Studies Portal

Open Access Resources

What is OA?

OA Dissertations

License

OA and the Social Sciences

OA Collections

Social Sciences Data Repositories