Open Access Scholarly Materials Guide: Open Access

"Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder." (Peter Suber)

The open access movement promotes the practice that scholarly publications are made available online without prohibitively high access costs and stringent copyright and licensing restrictions.  It facilitates quicker and broader dissemination of knowledge by removing the price and permission barriers to research outcomes. 

Open access is compatible with features of traditional publishing such as peer review, journal prestige, and researchers' career advancement.  It also offers many advantages, including:

• Quicker publishing time
• Enhanced discoverability through search engines
• Increased readership
• Increased citations (see article from science.org)
• Availability of download statistics

These books provide excellent introduction to open access:

• Open Access by Peter Suber (This book is complemented by a Web site.)
• Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future by Martin Paul Eve
• The Access Principle by John Willinsky

   
Selected Open Access Resources from OAD (Open Access Directory)

Law

• Also see SSRN under Social sciences, below.

• Bepress Legal Repository. Submissions in English and other languages for individual scholars through Selected Works​

Education 2 (OER)

(This is a list of repositories for open educational resources. Also see the OAD list of OER lists, in our section of Lists maintained by others. For repositories for research in the field of education, see Education 1, above.)

• MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching).
• OER Commons.

• RELPE (Red Latinoamericana Portales Educativos/ Latin American Network of Education Portals).

• SOL*R (Open Science in Belgium)

This list is part of the Open Access Directory. (repositories and databases for open data)

Contents

1 Archaeology

2 Astronomy

3 Biology

4 Chemistry

5 Computer Science

6 Energy

7 Environmental sciences

8 Geology

9 Geosciences & geospatial data

10 Linguistics

11 Marine sciences

12 Medicine

13 Multidisciplinary repositories

14 Physics

15 Social sciences

Related lists in OAD: Disciplinary repositories (primarily for texts, not data).

For news about data repositories, including some newly launched repositories not yet listed here, follow the oa.repositories.data tag of the Open Access Tracking Project.

See also: re3data.org. They intend to create a global registry of research data repositories.

Click above to search the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources

Click the image above to search UIS.Stat.

UIS.Stat contains all the latest available UNESCO data and indicators, for education, literacy, science, technology and innovation, culture, communication and information.

The Open Access Tracking Project provides real-time alert service for news about open access and other scholarly communication topics.