Search for Open Access Articles
Tools for Open Access
Comprehensive List of OA Tools
- Tools for OAA list, currently under development, from the OA Directory covering citation impact, current awareness, directories, dissemination, quality evaluation, harvesters, open licenses, policy, and more.
Journal Tools
- SHERPA/RoMEO95% of academic publishers offer standing permission for OA repository publication for some version of a work; check a journal's publishing policy here.
- Beyond Beall's List: Better Understanding Predatory PublishersExplains and contextualizes so-called "predatory" publishers.
- DOI SystemPaste a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) into the search box to resolve a DOI name. Results turn up OA and non-OA articles.
- Think, Check, SubmitA tool to help you choose the right journal for your research.
- HowOpenIsIt? Open Access Spectrum (OAS) GuideA guide to help users understand the components of OA journals; learn the differences between more vs. less open journals; and decide where to publish their work.
- BASEOperated by Bielefeld University Library, BASE is one of the world's largest search engines for academic OA web resources.
- Google Scholar
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One of the best and easiest-to-use tools for finding open access versions of journal articles. If an article is freely available — on the publisher’s site, on the author’s homepage, or in a disciplinary or institutional repository — Google Scholar will usually find it.
Book Tools
- Online Books PageUPenn's FAQ + tools for determining whether a book can go online.
Copyright
- Creative CommonsA nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free, easy-to-use tools.
OA Policy Tools
- ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies)A searchable registry of open access policies and mandates adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders.
- SHERPA/JulietSearch research funders' open access policies.
Scholarly Metrics
The Open Access movement overlaps with the push to broaden the meaning of scholarly impact and to take into account not just formal citations in scholarly articles but also blog posts, tweets, and other forms of recognition.
To learn about the various metrics (both traditional metrics and "altmetrics") that can help you analyze a journal, author, or article, consult the library's Research Metrics guide.
Publication Quality, Evaluating Publishers, and Bibliometrics
City Tech's Monica Berger has compiled an excellent research guide to help you evaluate scholarship and choose the right publisher for your work. The guide covers publication quality, evaluating publishers, OA publishing, Bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, Journal Ranking, and more.
Publication Quality, Evaluating Publishers, and Bibliometrics
Links to subscription resources within the guide will require City Tech's credentials, but you can find the same resources on the Graduate Center's A-Z list of Databases and log in with your GC credentials to search.
Also see Monica Berger's article "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Predatory Publishing but Were Afraid to Ask" in CUNY Academic Works.
Browser Extensions
Following are two browser extensions that make it easy to find legally available OA versions of articles. Read more about them in the article "Unpaywall and Open Access Button: Browser Extensions for Fast Access" on the GC Library's News & Events blog.
- Unpaywall
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An open database of millions of free scholarly articles that "harvest[s] Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make[s] it easy to find, track, and use." - Open Access Button
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A Firefox browser extension that allows you to freely and legally obtain research articles instantly or automatically request them from authors.
Resources
- OAD (Open Access Directory)A continually evolving compendium of open access resources in wiki format.
- SPARC - The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition"[A] global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education."
- Open Access Scholarly Publishers AssociationVetted OA publishers. The OASPA as established in 2008 to represent the interests of OA journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines.
OA Journals and Books
Journals
- Directory of Open Access JournalsIncludes over 2.5 million articles and more than 9,000 free online journals. Browsable and searchable by subject journal license, publisher, and language.
- Open Library of HumanitiesLaunched January 2013 to build a low cost, sustainable, open access future for the humanities. This non-profit is funded by an international consortium of libraries with a mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities for free, for everyone, forever.
Books
- Directory of Open Access BooksAcademic, peer reviewed, open access e-books.
- OA Book PublishersA list from the Open Access Directory.
- OAPEN LibraryContains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.
OA Repositories
- CUNY Academic WorksA service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship and creative work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.
- OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)Find subject and institutional repositories and/or search the full-text of material held in open access repositories.
- Disciplinary RepositoriesFrom the Open Access Directory.
Costs of Open Access Publishing
Producing a journal isn’t free — it costs time and money. The articles in OA journals are free to read, so how do the journals cover their costs? There are many different ways, including endowments, grant funding, and article processing fees (APCs) paid by authors.
Some OA journals charge APCs. Most do not. (Some subscription-based journals also charge fees (e.g., by the page, by the illustration!)
Some researchers worry that paying APCs is tantamount to vanity publishing. But that is not the case. At reputable journals, the fact that there are APCs for accepted articles has no bearing whatsoever on whether an article is accepted.
Also, APCs are generally not paid from researchers' pockets. Grant funding is frequently used to pay APCs. Some universities and research institutions pay APCs for their employees. And some journals waive APCs for those who cannot afford them.