Open Access

Finding OA articles (all fields of study)

Repositories per institute or country

Repositories per field of study

> Cognitive sciences

> Computer and Information technology

Informative sites about OA

Copyrights

Copyright (Wikipedia)

General information about copyright.

Copyright Management (CoMa)

CoMa provides insight into publishers’ policies regarding institutional repositories at the article level. CoMa can also help the author to generate a letter with which he/she can request the publisher’s permission to place the article in a repository.

Copyright toolbox

SURF and JISC have developed a copyright toolbox to inform publishers and authors about copyrights.

Creative Commons

This can be used for all results of academic research.

Licence to publish

SURF and JISC have developed a model contract to help the academic author arrange publication with a publisher. This model contract is especially helpful when publishing articles via the traditional publication process, whereby publications are only available to subscription holders.

SHERPA

Overview of publisher’s policies on the basis of ‘copyright transfer agreements’. These consider what is and is not permitted with preprints (the original version of an article as it was sent to the publisher, before it is reviewed), postprints (the final version after reviewing) and the publisher’s PDF file.

OA journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

DOAJ offers an up-to-date overview of quality-controlled academic publications that are freely available for Internet users, the so-called Open Access publications.

Open Access Central: Portal of BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, and PhysMathCentral

BioMed Central: publisher of more than 150 ‘peer-reviewed open access’ journals in the fields of biology and medicine; Chemistry Central: publisher of various ‘peer-reviewed open access’ journals in the field of chemistry.

Public Library of Science (PLOS)

PLoS is an initiative by a group of prominent scientists. PLoS initially started with PLoS Biology, but has since expanded the number of titles: PLOS Medicine, PLOS One, etcetera. The research articles published in these journals are freely available.

Free Medical Journals

An overview of more than 1,400 free biomedical publications, an edition by Amedeo.

Finding OA articles (all fields of study)

Search for OA articles --- OAIster

OAIster unlocks academic contributions that are worldwide accessible via the Internet. The data are collected based on the ‘Open Archive Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting’.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar can find ‘open access’ articles, in addition to articles that are only available with a subscription. Some publishers give Google Scholar access to the full text of their electronic publications. Citations and references to books can also be found using this search engine.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)

It is a multi-disciplinary, meta-search engine which in addition to ‘open access’ articles in ‘open access’ journals and repositories, can also find bibliographical data in bibliographical databases.

Citebase

Citebase Search is a free citation index for articles that are available at no cost via the Internet. This is still the beta-version, however, and cannot be used for evaluations. Coverage and analysis are (still) incomplete! Citebase contains articles from the following fields: natural science, mathematics, information science, and bio-medical sciences.

Repositories

OpenDOAR

Directory of Open Access Repositories, an ideal starting point for looking for academic repositories; a publication by Lund University.

Repositories per institute or country

DAREnet

DAREnet is an institutional repository for Dutch institutions and provides access to Dutch academic research output in digital form. Per 1 October 2006, DAREnet can access more than 86,426 digital files from the repositories at sixteen institutions.

Repositories per field of study

> Cognitive sciences

CogPrints

Cognitive Sciences Open Archive.

> Computer and Information technology

CiteSeer (not limited to OA)

Also known by the name ResearchIndex, is a search robot that was written for researchers connected to the NEC Research Institute. It performs automatic citation indexing for academic publications and preprints regarding Computer and Information technology that are available on the World Wide Web.

> Medicine

PubMed Central

Free digital archive for journals and articles from the biomedical sciences. A publication by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in co-operation with countless publishers.

Bookshelf

A few dozen biomedical standard works, published by NCBI (a part of the Entrez databases).

JournalReview

An open access archive for reviews and discussion of medical literature.

OpenMED@NIC

Medical open archive where each author can archive free texts himself.

> Physics

arXiv.org

Open access with more than 350,000 e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer sciences and quantitative biology. arXiv is the property of Cornell University, a private non-profit education institution.

Informative sites about OA

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Homepage Peter Suber

If you support open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints, then read my blog and newsletter. See what's been done and what you can do to help the cause. If you're not sure what open access is, then see my overview.