UC Alumni Information
Nearly all University of California libraries are open to the public. In-library resources are immediately available to all for reviewing on-site except in special-access locations such as archives and special collections. Public access workstations are provided in each library that is open to the public - please note that most electronic resources (license permitting) are accessible via these workstations.
University of California Alumni Association members
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Any UC library is your UC library as an UC alumni association member
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Cost: Free (with current alumni association membership)
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Borrowing Limit: 25 items; up to a 4-week loan period
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Request/Recall: Yes, 5 maximum concurrently – service limited to the UC library you are requesting materials from (contact Library Circulation to place requests)
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Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery: No
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Remote Access to Electronic Resources: No
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Verification Needed: Library must be able to verify current membership via membership card or alumni association
NOT an UC Alumni Association Member? California residents also may request a library card for checking out materials on-site at the respective UC campus. There is a yearly fee at the UC Davis Library for this check-out access.
Please see the section below about open-access portals that are growing substantially not just in the journal publishing world but also with book publishing and in the area of dissertations/theses.
Open Access Portals
What is open access? According to SPARC: "Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the
Repositories (multiple formats)
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OpenDOARDirectory of academic open access repositories. Search for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory using 'Search Repository Contents.'
Journal Portals
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Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) This link opens in a new windowDOAJ is an extensive index of open access journals from around the world. DOAJ's goal is to cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. Publications may emanate from academic, governmental, commercial, or non-profit private sources. To be included in the DOAJ, an open access journal must use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access and allow researchers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles.
[Coverage: Varies by journal title]
Book Portals
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Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books
Dissertation/Thesis Portals
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PQDT Open: ProQuest Dissertations and ThesesAdministered by: ProQuest LLC
Subset of ProQuest’s database which includes materials which “authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access.”
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Open Access Theses and Dissertations This link opens in a new windowOATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1000 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 2,311,795 theses and dissertations.
Preprint Repositories
Since the first preprint server ArXiv was established by the physics/astronomy community in 1991, the number of preprint servers by discipline has constantly expanded. The most up-to-date list of preprint servers/repositories is maintained by Wikipedia.
Comprehensive preprint servers/repositories are also listed in OpenDOAR (see above for top listing under Open Access Portals).
Government repositories
Most U.S. grant-funding agencies require that grant recipient/authors deposit a preprint/copy of their government-funded research in large government repositories. Below is a list of the most comprehensive of these government-mandate repositories.
Consult this short list of major U.S. government agency repositories.
Additional U.S. government repositories are also listed in OpenDOAR (see above for top listing under Open Access Portals).
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PubMed Central“PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). … Available to the public online since 2000, PMC was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM. … Since its inception in 2000, PMC has grown … to [be] an archive of articles from thousands of journals. … PMC contains more than 7.6 million full-text records, spanning several centuries of biomedical and life science research (late 1700s to present).”
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PubAgPortal to USDA-authored and other agricultural research on nutrition, food safety, animal and crop production, sustainable agriculture, rural development, economic and policy issues, statistics.
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National Science Foundation Public Access Repository (NSF PAR)In support of NSF's plan for providing public access to its funded research, the NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) is the designated repository where NSF-funded investigators deposit peer-reviewed, published journal articles and juried conference papers. NSF-PAR also provides search mechanisms to enable you to find and use these articles and papers.