For information on NetID library access and alumni borrowing privileges:

• See: Borrowing Guide: Alumni
• Contact Ask Yale Library at AskYaleLibrary@yale.edu

For alumni access to JSTOR and HeinOnline:

• Contact the Yale Alumni Office at alumni.yale.edu/contact-us

Frequently Asked Questions:

• I’ve just graduated. Do I still get access to ejournals?
• Why are my Net ID and VPN access being turned off?
• I'm an alumnus and I have registered for access to JSTOR. Why can't I get some of the articles?
• If I am an alum, can my spouse have library privileges?

Note: Free and Open Access resources are not maintained by Yale University Library, and the library cannot provide support to access them.

What is Open Access?

As a student at Yale University, you had access to resources subscribed to and purchased by Yale University Library and Yale University -- from the New York Times to ProQuest. As an alumni you can still access some of this material, but not all. 

To continue to use high-quality research material after graduation, you may need to seek out Open Access material on the web (or connect through another institution with research subscriptions). Open Access refers to research outputs that are distributed online free of barriers and payment. Some Open Access is peer-reviewed, some is not. Peer-reviewed Open Access material goes through the same intensive review process as other scholarly material. Other open resources are often made available through Creative Commons licenses.

The largest movement for Open Access research is with academic journals (read more about them on Wikipedia), but increasingly there has been a push to make more research openly accessible, notably government data as a result of President Obama's executive order in 2013.

This guide is a curated list of Open Access resources broken down by format type and discipline. It is not intended to be comprehensive, rather a sampling of what is available.