While you are a student at UC, you have an abundance of access to resources behind paywalls. What happens when you leave UC? How can you access information you need?

Information privilege is the idea that access to information can be based on an individual’s status, affiliation, or power. Much of the most reliable and current information in a particular field is found behind a paywall where only persons associated with an educational institution or professional organization, or have the monetary means to purchase journal subscriptions has access to this information.

You have information privilege based on your status as a college student, your affiliation with UC, and the (monetary) power of our library budget.

Remember when you are surfing the Web for answers, you're really just floating at the surface. There is a lot of value in diving down a little deeper, but to do so, you need ACCESS. As part of the UC community, you have extra access to a lot of information housed in library databases.

As a student at UC, you have access to almost 700 databases...but once you graduate, and you no longer have the information privileged afforded to you as an UC student, do you know how to access scholarly information?

Open Access is one way to access reliable, credible information. According to the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Open Access is defined as the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open access ensures that anyone with internet can access and use these results.

To learn more the current publishing model and how Open Access changes this, watch the brief video below.

Finding Open Access Materials

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

PubMed

PubMed comprises over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. (PubMed has a subscription version and a free version...through UC library, you can access the subscriptions version, but be aware there is a free option.)

arXiv.org

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for over 2 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

UnPaywall

An open database of over 33 million free scholarly articles.

UC's Digital Collections

UC has several digital collections and repositories, which are centralized digital locations in which the university seeks to collect and provide open access to:
- permanent university records with high research value
- scholarship and creativity by the university community
- the heritage and history of the University of Cincinnati community as represented in the university’s Archives and Special Collections

Your Local Public Library

Did you know that you can search many databases from home using your public library card? Find a library near you and sign up for a library card, if you don't have one already!