Open access resources— a list

A list of useful open access resources. We will keep this as a living list, so check back to see what’s added and use the comments box below to add any suggestions of your own.

Tim Redding

Published in

Veruscript Blog

4 min readJul 5, 2017

ArXiv

Open access to more than one million research articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.

20 million articles worldwide, including pre-publication versions of journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and theses. Searches can be limited to full-text articles, as well as peer reviewed articles.

CHORUS

CHORUS provides access to articles funded by US Government organisations, including Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior, National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institution and US Department of Agriculture.

Clarivate Analytics OA Journals

This lists all the journals listed in ISI that are fully open access. You can browse for, or search the journals.

Content Mine

Part of the Open Access Working Group, ContentMine aims to liberate 100,000,000 facts from the scientific literature using machine reading.

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) aids discovery of peer reviewed books published under an open access licence. It is a searchable index to information about these books and links to the full text of the publications at either the publisher’s website or repository.

Director of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. We cover DOAJ in more detail in our post here.

DOAI

DOAI (Digital Open Access Identifier) is an alternate DOI (Digital Object Identifier) resolver that takes you to a free version of the requested article, where available.

Eigenfactor Index of Open Access Fees

This plots journals that are listed in ISI by Article Processing Charge and Eignefactor Index. It attempts to quantify cost-effectiveness of open access journals.

Google Scholar

Enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, patents, case laws, and technical reports.

MELIBEA

A directory of institutional open access policies that identifies and analyses the existing policies that encourage, request or require open access to scholarly outputs that arise from projects, in whole or in part, supported by public funds.

OAIster

OAIster is a union catalog of over 30 million records representing open access resources.

Open Access Button

A browser extension that lets you search for OA versions of paywalled content. Works with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iPad, and Internet Explorer. If you can’t find OA version it lets you contact authors to request the article.

OpenDOAR: the Directory of Open Access Repositories

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of about 2500 academic open access repositories. It lets you search for repositories or the contents of repositories. Content includes research outcomes and pre-prints of journal articles and book chapters.

Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS)

OASIS offers practical steps for implementing Open Access for researchers, librarians, publishers, administrators, students and the public.

Pubmed Central

PubMed Central is the barrier-free NIH repository for peer-reviewed primary research articles and reports in the medical and life sciences.

Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Open Access

Resources from SPARC about Open Access.

SHERPA/FACT

Funders & authors compliance tool for open access

SHERPA/RoMEO

Journals’ and publishers’ open access policies

SHERPA/JULIET

Research funders’ open access policies

Think, Check, Submit

Helping researchers ensure that the journal they submit to is trustworthy and credible.

Unpaywall

Browser extension searches for OA versions of paywalled content. Works with Chrome and Firefox.

If you are looking to launch an open access journal, talk to us here at Veruscript. We handle the back office systems to let you focus on the editorial. We charge just £300 per paper for an end-to-end service with papers published in both HTML and PDF format. If you want to know more about the benefits of HTML, read our post here.

You can find out more about our publishing services on our website. We look forward to helping you build your journal.