Open Access Academic Resources - Cornwall Archaeological Society

It is surprisingly easy to access a wide range of academic resources for free, even without a university affiliation or institutional login. Independent researchers can find scholarly articles, digitised books, historical newspapers, archaeological reports, theses and other specialist publications through open-access repositories, public archives and research-sharing initiatives. Some subscription services also provide free access through community schemes, while universities, libraries and heritage organisations increasingly make their collections available online. These opportunities are not always widely known, so this guide brings together several useful starting points for researching archaeology, history and the historic environment, with a particular emphasis on Cornwall.

The Wikipedia Library

The Wikipedia Library is a scheme available to established Wikipedians—regular contributors to Wikipedia—which provides access to subscription-based research resources.

Its basic application criteria include:

At least 500 edits
At least six months of editing activity
At least 10 edits within the previous 30 days

More than 100 subscription-based publications and research resources are available, including JSTOR, Ancestry and the British Newspaper Archive.

Becoming an established Wikipedian is neither a quick nor a simple process. Contributors must take care to make good-faith edits that follow Wikipedia’s core content policies.

One possible way to contribute is by adding appropriate citations to articles published in Cornish Archaeology!

Open-access journals and papers

JSTOR hosts a substantial collection of open and freely accessible books and journals.

CORE, which is operated by the Open University, is a major repository of open-access research papers.

A similar project, Internet Archive Scholar, provides access to millions of open-access papers.

Books and historical texts

One of the largest online collections of public-domain material is the Internet Archive’s ebook and text collection.

It includes early works relating to Cornish archaeology by authors such as Borlase, Blight and Thomas, amongst many others.

Cornwall Archaeological Unit reports

Almost all Cornwall Archaeological Unit reports are freely available online through the Historic Environment Record’s Event Record.

The collection includes complete archaeological monographs, such as Adam Sharpe’s 1992 report, St Just: An Archaeological Survey of the Mining District.

University research and theses

Open Research Exeter is the University of Exeter’s open-access research portal. It includes preprints, published articles, datasets and theses.

The British Library’s EThOS service catalogues approximately 650,000 UK doctoral theses, many of which can be accessed through open-access copies.