How I made my own open-access “research portal”

(Honest Reporting/Flickr/Tristan F/CC BY-SA 2.0)
(Honest Reporting/Flickr/Tristan F/CC BY-SA 2.0)

It is difficult – but not impossible – to access academic articles if you don’t have access to journal subscriptions. In this blog, I go through my experience in trying to gain access to academic articles and data while working at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), and how I tried to make the process as easy and efficient as possible. I hope that by sharing the story, and sharing the research portal that I created, that researchers without access to journal subscriptions have more of a chance to find the information they need.

The portal aggregates over 750 sources of online, open data, academic and government articles and makes them searchable through a customisable Google search tool. Most of the work was in finding these resources; putting them in the custom Google search tool was simple. I provide a link to an Excel sheet with all the sources below.

Why did I create the portal?

Perhaps this is obvious, but it is very difficult trying to do research if your organisation does not subscribe to hundreds or sometimes thousands of academic journals. This is certainly what I found when I was working at UPNG. A number of major publishers and other organisations have made an effort to either provide free or discounted rates for journal access to developing countries, in addition to publishing open-access journals. However, even with these initiatives, I found that libraries in PNG are under-resourced and due to this are often not always able to utilise and disseminate what is available. In addition to this, even if you are aware of all of the various initiatives, these resources are scattered around the web and often have to be searched individually (very time consuming!).

Nevertheless, this is how I started out. A number of major websites are particularly useful; Google search results returned lots of non-academic articles, but Google ScholarResearch GateAcademia.edu and the Directory of Open-Access Journals were all good. A number of top universities and multilateral organisations also host various open-access portals: Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, UN, IMF, World Bank, ADB, and there are many more. Whenever I looked for information, I would get onto one or another of these sites and search each one for relevant publications. It wasn’t perfect, but it filled a gap, and I shared information about these sites with my colleagues at UPNG.

After a while, both my colleagues and I found the process tiresome. Meanwhile, I’d also found many more websites that hosted high quality open-access publications. The list of websites to check individually had gone from around 10 to more than 50. I noticed that a few were generally better than the others, so I checked those all the time, and mostly ignored the rest.

How did I create the portal?

Through some research, I came upon Google’s “custom search engine” (CSE) tool, which allows you to define the content and the sites you want to search. I realised I could use it to reduce the time spent having to search each site individually, so I got on to the developer site, inputted my list of open-access websites, and could soon start my own searches. I just had to type in a few keywords, exactly as you would on Google, and the search results would turn up free publications. I labelled the Google custom search site “The Open Access Research Portal”, and used it every time I wanted to search for reports or academic literature. It wasn’t perfect of course, but it made the whole process much more simple, faster and more targeted to my needs than any other search engine or website I had found.

Over time, I kept adding more sites, including content from 200 of the top universities in the world, over 100 other open-access repositories and over 100 government websites. The total list of sites searched now exceeds 750.

I know there are many researchers in PNG and elsewhere who face constraints on access to research. So I just wanted to write this story, and share the “Open Access Research Portal” publicly (click here) with others. Personally, I have found that, now that I have returned, I even use it in Australia, as it can search and bring-up reports from government websites, think tanks and NGO’s that are not published in academic journals, while at the same time filtering out the background ‘noise’ of a regular Google search.

How well does it work in comparison to the search capacity of a Western university system?

There may be some bias towards economic development in terms of search capacity, as this is my personal area of interest and I included websites that include this type of content. I also added in PNG government websites, but haven’t had the time to add government websites for all countries. However, most of the sites do have content from around the world. I did have to leave out a small handful of sites for various reasons. For example, the major publishers all publish some open-access journals – but the way their websites are structured make it difficult to limit searches to their open-access content.

This Excel spreadsheet lists all the websites individually. If you are interested, do look at the list of sites. For those who want to have the ability to refine their search, (i.e. exclude specific words from search results, etc.) this webpage lists some useful syntax. In fact, if you wanted to customise your own search based on this list, you could quite easily log in to Google CSE, create a new custom-search, input the data from the Excel sheet as a starting point, and then add in any websites you choose.

I am certain that there are ways to improve on this model, and if you have any suggestions for improvement or links to alternative portals, I would be glad to learn about them. I’d also like to open up a discussion in the comment section below. If you are a researcher in Papua New Guinea—or any country for that matter, where you do not have access to subscription journals: do you struggle to access academic literature? What have you done to try and to overcome these constraints? Perhaps we can collectively learn a thing or two from each other’s experiences.

Click here for the “Open Access Research Portal”.

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Rohan Fox

Rohan Fox was a Research Officer at the Development Policy Centre. He lectured in the economics program at the University of Papua New Guinea in 2015, 2016 and 2020.

9 Comments

  • Dear Rohan,

    This has been a personal struggle for me as well. I am happy that I asked for help on Twitter and it led me to this portal. Thank you very much Rohan for this much needed initiative.

    • Hi Hillary. Thanks so much for the comment and for sharing the open knowledge maps resource. I love how it categorizes material in a simple and visually-appealing way – a big tick for my visual-thinking self! Though I did find that it linked to some non-open-access articles, like this sweet potato article that I clicked through to which even the ANU doesn’t subscribe to, it seems. Nonetheless, it is very cool. I’ll add it to the toolkit and can definitely see myself (and I’m sure others too) using it going forward. Thanks!

  • Rohan this is great. Previously I have always had access to journals. However, since semi-retiring I have struggled getting access. I too started to build a list of reputable sites and would have to go into them one by one. However, I did come across two valuable points of access. One is the National Library of Australia. So by joining you can access their electronic journals. They do not have a lot on development but nevertheless there are some. There is often one to two year embargo on access. The second is ANU Alumni. Being a graduate of ANU allowed me to access selected journals. There is a range and it does include Wiley and SAGE journals which for me has been very useful. I am based in Canberra so if you had time I would like to discuss some of this further.

  • Great work, Rohan! I hear you on the challenges we face in the limited settings environment.
    The one thing we try build in our health field researchers is the ability to identify quality publications. That’s an important skill given that not everything free is good quality. In fact sometime the measure of quality comes on the basis of an indexed citation. Being able to pick these citations in search databases is key. Having said that, as you’ve mentioned some of the development partners try to support developing countries institutions of higher learning with free access to journals that would otherwise have a cost implication (e.g. World Health Organization’s Hinari is a good option accessed through institutions ).

    • I was not aware of these, they are truly excellent resources thank you! And you were right about OMICS.

      It is validating that someone has put a lot of effort and resources in to a resource like JURN, that uses the same custom search feature.

      I’m going to give a bit of thought to defining a niche and adding more Pacific-related sources, and re-naming the search function as the Pacific Open Access Research Portal, as the search tool I put together has a number of PNG and Pacific related sites that don’t seem to be searched on other portals (e.g. NRI, PNG govt, SSGM, PNGeconomics, and others, not to mention Devpolicy!)

  • Excellent initiative and very useful resource! Thanks for setting this up, Rohan. I’m doing quite a bit of research on PNG but I’m not affiliated with an academic institution, so lack access to their academic subscriptions. I did some trial searches on your OARP and already got some good results that would have taken me a fair amount of time to find using the regular Google approach or individual open access portal browsing.

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