When I was a student, way back in the middle ages, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web. Consequently there were no online electronic resources, full-text or otherwise. If I wanted to look for something, I had to use a printed index (a publication named Biological Abstracts) which was updated if I recall correctly, on a monthly basis. If I found something interesting that I wanted to read, I had to a request an Inter-Library Loan. In this brave new world, there's a myriad of electronic resources online, a lot of which offer full-text of articles at the click of a link. We subscribe to some electronic resources, quite a few from EBSCO for example. However there's no guarantee that EBSCO, or any other DBS library-subscribed resource will have the full-text of an article that you want to read. This long preamble serves to introduce a long posting on other places on the web to look for, and find, full-text articles.
Linked to on the library website and in the A to Z is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I'll explain the name i.e. define "open access journal" another time, but basically this is a directory of scholarly journals that meet quality standards (via peer-review or editorial quality control) and are freely available for all to read at the time of publication. At the time of writing, there are 4790 journals in the directory, 1896 journals are searchable at article level and 358974 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
OpenJ-Gate is similar to DOAJ, but is larger although criteria for inclusion are not so clear. In addition to open access journals, OPenJ-Gate also includes professional and trade publications. OpenJ-Gate originates from India, so there's a chance that more content from the developing world will be included.
I don't know how different the Open Access Journals Search Engine is from either of the above; it's not as if there's thousands of open access journals for each site to ignore. This is a search engine rather than a directory, rather like...
...Jurn, an academic search engine that searches free open access ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content and "free sample book chapters" offered by scholarly publishers. Here's a list of indexed titles.
Highwire is an epublishing platform that offers free access to the full-text of nearly 2,000,000 articles. Unfortunately most of these are from science journals, rather than business or the humanities, thus perhaps limiting interest to psychology and addiction students.
These are all good places to look for full-text that can't be found in our subscribed electronic resources. There are of course, other places you can look, such as pre-print archives, faculty webpages and institutional repositories. A pre-print, as the name suggests is a draft version of an article that is yet to be printed. Many publishers and individual journals all ow for some form of self-archiving, be it pre-print or post-print. Academics often show off their articles on their personal pages on university and college websites - search for the article title and look for results from personal webpages - while most research institutions have created repositories of publications produced by their staff. That's a lost of content, some of which will be full-text, potentially available if you know how to where to look...
...and of course there are a few good sites that can assist you in your quest:
OAIster started off as a University of Michigan project to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable. A partnership with Online Computer Library Center, Inc (OCLC) has followed that ensures continued access to open-archive collections. Note however that OAIster includes non-academic and non-open access material.
OpenDOAR is a directory of academic open-access repositories - you can either search for repositories, or search repository contents.
University of Maryland Open Archives, E-print, and Preprint Archives is exactly what is says on the tin, and is nice if you have the time to spare, otherwise search OAISTER or OPenDOAR.
If all else fails, there's always Inter-Library Loan, nicely bringing us back to the start of the post.
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