How to search for information: Open Access

Open publications include

• OA journals with all contents open (scientific and professional publications)
• Individual open access articles in scientific journals otherwise subject to a fee
• Articles, theses, and other publications in organizational or subject-specific repositories such as Theseus, Aaltodoc, Helda
  • Links to repositories
• Self-archived publications
  • Self-archiving = an article is originally published in a scientific journal subject to a fee and then saved in an open repository. The self-archived copy is freely available immediately or after a pre-determined time (embargo)
  • Publications of public research organizations and public authorities

Find open access publications

Article databases

HH Finna's article search and many other databases allow you to filter your search to open access publications.

Search engines and other services specializing in open access publications

• Google Scholar - Google's search engine specializing in research publications
• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) - search engine for open research data
• CORE - searches articles in open repositories and open access journals
• DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books
• DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
• Journal.fi - Finnish research journals online
• OSF Preprints - Open Science Network, searches several preprint archives at the same time
• TiSci - scientific journals in Finland

More information on Alternative Access to articles (site by FinELib Consortium)

The openness of research is also promoted by making research data available for others to use.

Search for Finnish open data with the following services:

• Aila - Finnish Social Science Data Archive
• Avoindata.fi - national portal for open data
• Etsin - find research datasets
• Helsinki Region Infoshare - public data from Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen, and Vantaa
• Open data by Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
• Statistics Finland - open statistical data

Research data must be cited, just like other sources (books, articles, etc.). The original producer of the data must be given credit.

• Referencing guideline for Haaga-Helia's student reports and theses (see section Research data)
• Citing data - instructions by the Finnish Social Science Data Archive
• Tracing data : Data citation roadmap for Finland - national recommendation by Finnish Committee for Research Data

Creative Commons

When you use publications or data produced by someone else, you need to use appropriate citations and be aware of copyright and licensing issues. Materials and data on the internet may either be freely utilized or use may be restricted. The terms for use are usually determined by licenses. A licensing system often used is Creative Commons (CC).

Creative Commons license conditions are listed in the table below. An author of original material can decide how users may utilize his/her material and indicate these rights with a combination of the CC conditions.

For instance, a combination can look like this:

This work is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

More information is available on the Creative Commons website.

Using images

Images published on the internet are protected by copyright. ImagOA guide by Aalto University provides information on searching and using open access images.