Students in high school and college are often tasked with writing research papers, and though the standards might vary by grade level and subject matter, it's generally important to have reputable sources at hand to provide information and evidence to their claims. At Portland District Library, we're lucky to have a robust non-fiction section in both our youth and adult areas, as well as a selection of teen offerings to bridge the gap between the two sections.
However, as much as we'd love to, we don't always have the most up-to-date information about all topics on our shelves. As a public library, we can provide information for a wide variety of general topics, but we are limited in what specific kind of texts we can keep on our shelves. And back in the old days, students may have had to travel to an academic library at a university (maybe MSU?) to access scholarly research beyond what was on their local library's shelves.
But we have the internet! And something very exciting has been happening in the world of academic literature.
I remember writing a research paper and finding what looked like a perfect article online to get more information - but oops, it wasn't available through my library. I would've had to pay to get access to just that one article, and it might not even have the info I needed! As I'm writing this, I'm looking at an article in the Journal of Library Administration that costs $50 to access the one article - if I wanted to read the whole journal issue it came from, it would be $230. And that's not for life, either - that's for 48 hours (for the one article) to a month (for the issue). Needless to say, I won't be reading the whole thing, if only because I plan on buying groceries next week.
This is super common as costs rise across universities and academic publishers. If your library or university doesn't pay for a subscription to an online journal, you can't read it without forking over serious dough yourself.
This is why I'm so thrilled about Open Access. Open Access Journals are free to read for anyone, be they a student writing a paper or just a person trying to learn as much as they can about a subject. You can read scholarly papers, the kind that you know is going to be a trustworthy source for your research, without having to pay a crazy price just to read a single article.
There are a number of sources you can use to find these Open Access articles. MeL has a database called "Academic Search Complete", which can be found at this link. Not all of those articles are Open Access, but if you Google the name of the journal it's from, you can quickly find out if there's a free-to-read version.
There's also the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which can be found at this link. All of the sources listed on this directory are Open Access, which means they're free to read and cite.
So if you or someone you know has to write a research paper for a class, or just research a new topic for fun, Open Access is going to be your best friend. And if you need any help citing your sources, figuring out your search terms, or even just making sense of what you're looking at, then Portland District Library is here to help.
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