Open Access for Social Work Research

Open Access (OA) means that full text or dataset of the work deposited is freely accessible to the world via the web. Open Access also democratizes information by ensuring that all in the field and globally have access to the same information instead of it being kept private by publishers or paywalls. 

Things are starting to change which is exciting! Now, 90% of scholarly publishers worldwide now allow some version of the documents they publish to be made available.

This guide lists other open access resources relevant to the field of social work for conducting research.

• Open Social Work: A collaborative project that addresses open education and open access projects and initiatives in social work.
• Unpaywall: Unpaywall finds the kind of articles you'd see in peer-reviewed scholarly journals like Science or PLOS One, plus pre-publication versions of similar work from preprint repositories like arXiv.