Arts & Creative Industries Subject Guide

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online Service

• This service from the British Library aims to offer a 'single point of access' where researchers can access ALL theses produced by UK Higher Education.
• Download digital and digitised theses is free to the researcher. A small number of participating institutions may not be able to offer Open Access and in this case the researcher may have to pay for the digitisation.
• Where a thesis must be digitised before supply, you can expect a short delay. However, you will be informed when the thesis is ready for collection and you can then log on to the system and download it.
• EThOS can only offer the theses of participating institutions.

Edinburgh Napier Repository

• Our Open Access showcase for the published reseach output of the university.
• Edinburgh Napier University staff and research students are required to place in the repository, post-refereed, accepted texts of documents being published, together with texts of papers given at conferences; but data sets, programs, images, scores, music, and exhibition catalogues should also be lodged in digital format. 

ResearchGate

• Networking for researchers - not just scientists, check out the subject areas at the foot of the screen.
• Communicate - interact with fellow researchers and build your research network
• Collaborate - post updates, discuss methods and co-edit with colleagues
• Download full-text papers, find conferences and research jobs 

Academia.edu

• Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research..
• Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow
• 27,386,629 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 7,334,953 papers and 1,744,955 research interests.
• Academia.edu attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.

Dissertation Express

• We don't subscribe to this service, but you can still perform searches as an individual, though they are capped at 40 hits.
• You won't be able to get the full text unless you are willing to pay for it, but you can see titles and institutional affiliations.

Core

• "The world’s largest collection of open access research papers"
• CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public. In this way CORE facilitates free unrestricted access to research for all.
• users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, as long as authors retain control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and citedas 
• Includes Core Discovery browser extension which you can use to find freely accessible copies of research papers where they exist.

OAIster 

• OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open archive digital resources
• This link searches OAIster only, but OAIster results are also returned by WorldCat searches
• The records of the open archive digital resources available via OAIster lead to a wide range of materials and include:
  • Digitized (scanned) books and journal articles
  • Digital text
  • Audio files (wav, mp3)
  • Video files (mp4, QuickTime)
  • Photographic images (jpeg, tiff, gif)
  • Data sets (downloadable statistical information)
  • Theses and research papers

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

• Tracks the growth of existing open-access archives
• ROARMAP tracks the growth of institutional self-archiving policies and is an easy way to find institutional repositories.