Open Educational Resources

What is Open Access?

Open access (OA) is a broad international movement that seeks to grant free and open online access to academic information, such as publications and data.

A publication is defined as 'open access' when there are no financial, legal, or technical barriers to accessing it - that is to say when anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for, and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way within the legal agreements. 

Check out our Open Access LibGuide.

Benefits

• Higher visibility of your work
• Fostering the sharing of scientific information
• Encouraging communication between researchers
• More effective use of funds
• Access to scientific information for everyone

Challenges

• APCs - Article Processing Charges (publication fee)
• Predatory journals
• Lack of OA journals in some scientific areas
• Low impact factors of some OA journals
• Misconceptions about OA

Routes to Open Access

Finding OA Publishers

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - online directory that indexes over 11,000 high quality, OA, peer-reviewed journals.
• The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - a database that refers readers to open access books on publishers’ websites. DOAB contains 12,000 books or chapters from 280 publishers.
• OAPEN - online library for open access book that promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication
• Open Access Publishing Scholarly Association (OASPA) - a diverse community of organisations engaged in open scholarship.  
• OAIster Database - union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources. It includes more than 50 million records that represent digital resources from more than 2,000 contributors.eLife - OA journal in the Life Sciences
• ROAD - Directory of Open Access Scholalry Resources
• Open Library of Humanities (OLH) - non-profit OA publisher for the humanities
• ISSN-Matching of Gold OA Journals (ISSN-GOLD-OA) 4.0 - the University of Bielefeld compiles a regularly updated list of journals from many other sources, and it is one of the most comprehensive sources of OA journals so far. 

• Journals4Free - a directory of full or partial open access journals (i.e., with an embargo period). Results may be limited to titles included in PubMed, Scopus, and ISI databases.

Finding OA Repositories

• SHERPA RoMEO - tool for checking if your publisher allows self-archiving (make sure to always check the policy of your journal)
• Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) - a searchable international registry charting the growth of open access mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders.
• AUBG Institutional repository
• OpenDOAR - Directory of academic OA repositories
• The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) - the aim is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. 
• Disciplinary repositories (arXiv, Europe PubMed Central, etc.)
• Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) – OA repository for the Social Sciences.
• Zenodo - General OA repository.
• OpenAIRE - European Repository Network.
• Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) - is a  digital library and cooperative electronic publishing model of OA journals. SciELO was created to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries.