Publicly Available Content Database: About

• Health & Medical
• Science & Technology
• Social Sciences
• Psychology
• Finance
• Business
• Education
• Woman's Studies
• Music

• Scholarly Journals
• Trade Journals
• Working Papers
• Reports
• Books
• Conference Papers & Proceedings
• Other Sources 

Designed to complement other databases and collections, this multidisciplinary database brings together or links to full text for publicly available scholarly content from a number of different sources from around the world. It includes content from major subject repositories such as arXiv as well as open access journals. Content includes journal articles, pre-prints, dissertations, conference papers and reports.

Please note that Publicly Available Content Database is also a component of ProQuest Central. Subscribers of ProQuest Central have access to 40 ProQuest databases including Publicly Available Content Database.

Customers with other active ProQuest platform subscription products can also turn it on by request for no additional cost.

How has content been selected for Publicly Available Content Database?

Most content in Publicly Available Content Database was already included in ProQuest Central and other ProQuest databases. Open access journals in ProQuest databases have been identified primarily based on inclusion in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) or ROAD. Content from publishers or sources known to be fully publicly available is also included (for example, all titles in ProQuest databases from fully open access publishers such as Hindawi are included, although not every title has yet been listed in DOAJ).

Non-journal content including dissertations, working papers/preprints and conference proceedings are included. However, non-scholarly source types, such as government documents and news, are not included.

In addition, records from preprint repositories such as arXiv have been added to Publicly Available Content Database, with links out to the full text; these records are not in any other ProQuest databases.

Product Features & Benefits

• Vetted coverage of quality scholarly open access sources. Access and use hundreds of reliable, scholarly open access titles. Potentially problematic publications that are not consistent with ProQuest's editorial guidelines are excluded.
• Easily identify open access content. Open access journals in ProQuest databases have been identified primarily based on inclusion in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) or ROAD. Content from publishers or sources known to be publicly available is also included. An Open Access icon will appear in the list of results on the ProQuest platform for any articles in this database. Note that individual open access articles in hybrid journals, and non-scholarly publicly available sources such as government documents and news, are not included.
• Cutting-edge thinking. See the latest academic thinking first by accessing thousands of preprints/working papers from arXiv and other collections.
• Links to full text when not available in the platform. For many journals the full text articles are fully searchable and presented within the ProQuest platform. For all other content in this database where we do not have the full text inside the platform, there are clear and reliable links direct to the external full text. 
• Full text available to unauthenticated users. Full text for this publicly available content is not restricted when users link into it via Google Scholar, consistent with its open status.
• Link outs to other external open access content from citation records. Although not part of the Publicly Available Content Database as such, together with the release of this database a related enhancement to the platform provides an indicator of OA status and dynamic links to external, legitimate, OA sources based on DOIs in citation records. This helps users locate publicly available full text for OA articles published in journals which are not themselves fully open and do not license the full text of articles to ProQuest.
• Global coverage. Over 90% of the journal titles are published outside of North America, with titles from over 70 countries.

To view the latest title list and publication coverage, please visit: