LibGuides: Open Access: OA Resources

OA Research Repositories

Open Uleth Scholarship (OPUS)
Collects and preserves the scholarly output of the UofL, including theses and dissertations, making it freely available worldwide.
OpenDOAR
A searchable Directory of Open Access Repositories world wide.
Canadian Institutional Research Repositories
Listing of institutional repositories, by province.
ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories
Has some overlap with OpenDOAR, but another place to find open access repositories.

OA Publishing Directories

DOAJ 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.

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.
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
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.
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

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.
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.

Interdisciplinary OA 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.

Hathi Trust
Pronounced "hah-tee." Over 18 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.

OA Books Toolkit

Open Access Books Toolkit

This toolkit, developed by Springer Nature and the University of Glasgow with support from the universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Utrecht, aims to help academic book authors to better understand open access book publishing, and to promote and increase trust in open access books. This toolkit may also be of use to stakeholders including publishers, universities, research funders and research institutions.

The OAPEN open access books toolkit offers a coherent set of more than 30 individual articles addressing various topics related to open access books such as:

What is open access?
Common misconceptions about open access
Copyright and licensing
Funding
Quality assurance
Publishing options
Discoverability & impact

In addition to tools and links to actually help a researcher looking to publish an OA book.

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:

Open Access

OA Research Repositories

OA Publishing Directories

Subject-Specific Open Access Resources

Interdisciplinary OA Resources

OA Books Toolkit

Open Access Week @ the U of Lethbridge

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