Library Guides @ VIU: Open Access: Open Academic Search Alternatives

Open Academic Search Alternatives

Many search engines and tools that locate information across library collections and other organizations, compiling results from diverse physical archives or online databases or repositories, are built and maintained by commercial providers. These may be supported by advertising or by licensing fees so that costs of use are not presented directly to the user, but there may be implications for maintenance or development, and in approaches to managing content and user data.

There are alternatives that seek to rely on open infrastructure and open data to connect researchers to research information in this way, often but not always focusing on openly accessible content. Frequently these are found under the auspices of universities or not-for-profit organizations. Some of these alternatives include:

OpenAlex
...scholarly works including coverage of humanities, non-English languages, and the Global South, linked to disambiguated authors and institutions, and enriched with topic information, SDGs, citation counts, and much more.
"OpenAlex is made by OurResearch, a nonprofit dedicated to making research open."
OpenAIRE Explore
EXPLORE is built on the OpenAIRE Graph, one of the largest open scholarly record collections worldwide: An open dataset of research information covering publications, research data, research software items, from data sources, linked to grants and organizations. Explore results may be filtered by SDG.
"OpenAIRE is a Non-Profit Partnership of 50 organisations, established in 2018 as a legal entity, OpenAIRE A.M.K.E, to ensure a permanent open scholarly communication infrastructure to support European research."
Internet Archive Scholar
"This fulltext search index includes ...research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and preprints crawled from the World Wide Web.
...We are a US 501(c)(3) non-profit library, building a global archive of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form."
BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
"BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources... You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
We are indexing the metadata of all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents..."