Community Access

Did you know that in 2019/20 UBC Library spent $18 645 618 on its extensive research collections? Any community member can visit us in person to access a good portion of it. Any of the librarians mentioned on this guide can help you navigate what you are looking for!

Here are a few ways you can get started on your own:

• Search for an database or article
• Browse these helpful guides to find curated resources by subject
• Search for an academic journal by name

However, for many of our resources you would need to visit us in person to access our licensed collections. Jump ahead to the ‘Visiting our Branches’ section for more details on what we will need to help you. UBC Alumni can also access several materials in UBC Library’s licensed collections. Learn more in this UBC Alumni Resources guide.

UBC Library has many different resources that are freely available to anyone from anywhere! Check out this video about open access at UBC. Here are a few different ways that you can get started.

• Open Collections include digital photos, books, newspapers, maps, videos, theses and more. These publicly-accessible collections bring together locally created and managed content from the Library’s open access repositories including cIRcle, UBC’s digital repository. Special collections include the Uno Langmann Family Collection of British Columbia Photographs and the Chung Collection, but there are many more. Explore now: open.library.ubc.ca
• British Columbia Regional History Digitized History Collections has copies of regional historical resources including photographs, textual documents and publications from participating BC memory institutions.
• Anyone can use UBC Library’s homepage and limit your results to freely available content by using the “Refine Your Search” filter on the left hand navigation and checking the box for “Open Access”.
  • You will find materials sourced through Unpaywall that look like this: . Type your keywords in the search box here: https://ubc.summon.serialssolutions.com/?#!/search?ho=f&fvf=IsOpenAccess,true,f&l=en
• Points to the Past is a gateway to a world-class collection of primary sources, made up of nearly 200 million pages of digitized historical content – maps, photos, newspapers, manuscripts, pamphlets, portraits, and much more. Anyone in BC can access this resource for free from anywhere in BC.

Tips you can try from home: Unpaywall is a database of open access versions of articles and you can also get a downloadable extension. The Open Access Button is a website and browser extension where you can search for free academic research papers.

• Search for open access indexes and databases by keyword or journal title using this search directory. Just make sure to use “more options” below the search and select the “open to everyone” checkbox.
• Among its many other physical and digital collections, UBC Archives has made over 40,000 images from the founding of the University to the present day available online, for free. Start exploring these historical images, and other archival materials here: https://archives.library.ubc.ca/ubc-archives-photograph-collections/
• Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find peer-reviewed, open access journals in many different languages and subject areas. Also, UBC Library hosts open access journals from several UBC faculties and students organizations here using the Open Journal System (OJS). However, please note that a few journals do charge a fee for article access.
• OpenDOAR, the global Directory of Open Access Repositories is a free directory of repositories worldwide that houses open access research materials.

• Interested in open data? Explore the Scholars Portal Dataverse to find data sets produced by UBC researchers. You can also visit the Abacus data network. Many data sets, such as those from Statistic Canada, are open access, though some are limited to UBC staff, faculty, and students. Learn more about data and statistics with this handy research guide.