Free access to Plagrave Macmillan journals througout April

April is the cruellest month, except if you're looking for free access to Palgrave Macmillan journals, in which case, your luck's in.

Palgrave Macmillan are pleased to announce that from April 1-30, 2013 they will be offering free online access to their full journals portfolio.

All current and archival content spanning the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Business will be available, including access to the following high-profile journals, Journal of International Business Studies  Journal of the Operational Research Society, Feminist Review , International Politics and the award-winning Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies.

Palgrave Macmillan Journals

The Directory of Open Access Books

As the name suggests, there is a relationship with the Directory of Open Access Journals and as the name further suggests it's a directory of free full-text academic e-books, and its main purpose is to improve the visibility and discoverability of open access textbooks.  I've no idea if it's of any use to you, but it's certainly worth a look and of course new titles will be added all the time, so even if you can't find anything you want to peruse, you can try again at a later date. As I type, the directory contains links to 756 books, but that number will only increase  Go here to have a look.      

Temporary free access to Cambridge Online Journals

Free access to Cambridge Online Journals for the next 6 weeks

I'll let them say it themselves

In order to reach out to new readers, who may not enjoy access to high quality scientific and academic research, all 2009 and 2010 content on Cambridge Journals Online (CJO) will be made free to access between 15th July and 30th August 2011.

We hope this period of free access enables researchers, students and interested individuals to benefit from some of the world’s most valuable academic content. It will also enable Cambridge Journals to study patterns of usage and formulate improvements to CJO which will benefit all users of CJO going forwards.

To access the free articles, simply use the ‘Browse Journals’ or ‘Search’ options at the top of this page. To take advantage of all CJO functionality, including the ability to bookmark papers and save your searches, please register here.

Check it out.

Palgrave McMillan March Madness!

I feel I should be shouting this in the style of an annoying television advertisement:

For the month of March, the academic publishers Palgrave McMillan are offering free and unrestricted access to their 70 ejournals, including such titles as the Journal of Brand Management, American Journal of Psychoanalysis and Feminist Review. A full list of all their title can be found here This giveaway ends on March 31. I'm sure terms and conditions apply, though it doesn't actually say that.

Institutional Repositories

An institutional repository is an online archive of material produced by an institution. For academic institutions, this would include research papers, dissertations and teaching material. Generally, institutional repositories are created for a number of reasons: to increase the visibility of the institution's research output; to store and preserve material that otherwise may be easily lost and to provide open access to the institution's scholarly research. These days, most research institutions have created and populated institutional repositories, but where to find them? The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) has been mentioned here before. This is a directory of academic open access repositories. In addition to the directory OPenDOAR lets you search for specific respositories, and perhaps more usefully, lets you search repository contents. Similar in nature is the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) which like OopenDOAR allows you to browse or search for specific directories and also search the contents of directories. I'd also like to mention Repository66, which is a mashup (a web site or application that combines data or functionality from different sources) derived from Google Maps and OpenDOAR & ROAR, showing the worldwide location of different institutional repositories. Institutional repositories provide a treasure trove of freely available research output that should be considered if you are having no luck with more traditional electronic resources.