Students, independent researchers and small businesses can now access many of the world’s best academic papers across science, technology, medicine and other disciplines through York’s Libraries and Explore centres.

This is the result of a unique collaboration between librarians and publishers, who have made their journal content available for free to UK libraries under a new initiative, Access to Research.

Access to Research will provide licensed online access to over 1.5 million journal articles and conference proceedings through library terminals. With 8,400 journals included in the initiative at the moment, this will make content in the fields of Health and Biological Sciences (20%), Social Sciences (18%) and Engineering (14%) available to the public for the first time. Users will also be able to read a wide variety of articles in the fields of Art and Architecture, Business, Environmental Science, History, Journalism, Languages, Politics, Film, Philosophy and Religion, Mathematics and Physics.

Access to Research has been launched in response to a call for greater access to publicly-funded research and it is hoped that the project will encourage more residents to visit and use their local libraries. It has been rolled out as a pilot until February 2016 during which, interest and uptake will be closely monitored to see how the service could be developed in the future.