LibGuides: Open Access: OA Resources

Open Access Week @ the U of Lethbridge

Open Access Week is celebrated annually during the 3rd week in October.

Watch for further details on special events held during this week on the library website. Past guests have included Jennifer Laloup from PLOS (Public Library of Science), Dr Rosie Redfield (UBC), and most recently Gerald Beasley, Vice-Provost & Chief Librarian at the University of Alberta:

Local Open Access

Open Access is happening everywhere, even right here at the University of Lethbridge! Check out these local OA resources.

Open Uleth Scholarship (OPUS)
The U of L's open access research repository. Collects the scholarly output of the campus including theses and dissertations.
Journal title list
Open Access journals are integrated with the list of journal titles that the University of Lethbridge Library subscribes to.
Search Institutional Repositories in western Canada
A federated search engine covering the institutional repositories of the Council of Pacific and Prairie University Libraries (COPPUL)

Directories

Want to see if there's an Open Access resource in your subject area (and there probably is)? Try here!

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) This link opens in a new window
Search for a journal or a journal article. Contains free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.

OpenDOAR
A searchable Directory of Open Access Repositories world wide. Find a repository on your subject or in your area.
Repository 66
A graphical representation of repositories world wide.
ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories
Has some overlap with OpenDOAR, but another place to find open access repositories.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
A searchable index for "peer reviewed books published under an Open Access license".
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The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
JURN
JURN searches hundreds of free scholarly ejournals in the arts & humanities.
Society Publishers with Open Access Journals
A Google Doc spreadsheet prepared by Caroline Sutton, Peter Suber, and Amanda Page which lists OA journals published by scholarly societies. Last update: Sept 10, 2013

Interdisciplinary Open Access Resources

There are so many open access resources for finding journals, journal articles, and books that we can't possibly list them all. But here are a few of the biggest & best with interdisciplinary coverage.

DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
Search for a journal or a journal article. Contains free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages.
Hathi Trust
Pronounced "hah-tee." Over 8 million titles (including books & journals) 2.5 million of which are in the public domain. It was originally conceived as a back up of Google Books and has grown into a cooperative project to preserve library materials converted from print to digital.
OAIster
One of the original open access databases with over 23 million records. Originally developed at the University of Michigan with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation it gathered Open Archives Initiative compliant resources (still a standard of Open Access) but is now maintained by OCLC and delivered on the worldcat platform.
ROAR Content Search
Though ROAR is primarily a directory, they do offer a trial search which uses a Google Custom Search to search the contents of all the repositories in their directory.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 800 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 1,779,326 theses and dissertations.
Find ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations)
Provides a number of links to search engines covering national collections of theses and dissertations
Paperity
Paperity is the first multi-disciplinary aggregator of peer-reviewed Open Access journals and papers, "gold" and "hybrid". The ultimate goal is to aggregate 100% of Open Access literature, published in any place around the world, in any field of research.

Subject Specific Open Access Resources

There are so many open access resources for finding journals, journal articles, books, and other materials that we can't possibly list them all, but here are a few of the biggest & best with specific coverage.

AgEcon Search: Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics This link opens in a new window
Agricultural & Applied Economics including working papers, conference papers, and journal articles.

ArXiv.org
Physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics e-prints (articles & papers).
BMC Cell Biology
A peer-reviewed Cell Biology journal also indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, BIOSIS, CAS, EMBASE, Scopus, CABI, Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Google Scholar.
F1000Posters
F1000 Posters is a unique open access repository for posters across biology and medicine.
PLoS One
Peer-reviewed scientific and medical research. Includes articles from journals in biology, medicine, computational biology, genetics, pathogens, and neglected tropical diseases.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A free online encyclopedia of philosophy from "abduction" to "zombies." No articles here.

Government Open Access

Many of the resources the U.S. Government produces are considered open access. Check these out!

ERIC - Education Resources Information Center
Education related materials including journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers and other materials. It's about half full text.
Fed in Print
Research published by the Board of Governors and all 12 Federal Reserve Banks including core economic reviews, specialized regional and international publications, working papers, annual report essays, selected speeches, community development publications, and conference papers.
MedlinePlus
Consumer medical information.
PubChem
Information on the biological activities of small molecules.
PubMed Central
Biomedical and life sciences journal literature from the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Subject Guide

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Open Access: OA Resources

Open Access Week @ the U of Lethbridge

Local Open Access

Directories

Interdisciplinary Open Access Resources

Subject Specific Open Access Resources

Government Open Access

Sponsored Open Access

Subject Guide

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