Open Access Journals - Open Access - A guide for researchers - LibGuides at South East Technological University

What are Open Access journals?

There are different ways in which Journal Articles are made available as Open Access

Gold OA– Full access to all the articles on the journal website, under a creative commons or similar license. An Article Processing Charge (APC) is usually paid by the author (or other funder).
Hybrid – a subscription journal where the publisher allows authors to pay an APC to make individual articles open access. It may also be waived if there is an OA agreement in place with the publisher by your institution. Some articles in the Journal will be Open Access and some behind a paywall.
Diamond/Platinum- journals that publish OA but do not charge APCs. These are funded by institutions, advertising, philanthropy, etc.
Bronze - journals that are free to read online but do not have a license - they are not generally available for reuse.
Green – refers to self-archiving (republishing) generally of the pre or post-print of articles in repositories. This will need to conform to the copyright restrictions of the publisher of the article.

UnPaywall

UnPaywall
An open database of 21,648,962 free scholarly articles. They harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use. Unpaywall is run by Impactstory, a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarship more accessible to everyone.

Open Access Books

DOAB - Directory of Open Access Books: A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from a range of publishers.
InTech Books: One of the largest open access collection of books in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
OAPEN: A collection of freely accessible academic books, mainly in the areas of humanities and social sciences.
Open Book Publishers: Publishes monographs and textbooks which are freely available to read online.

Directories of Open Access Journals

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
A directory of academic peer-reviewed books from many publishers.
OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories
Provides access to academic open access repositories from around the world.
ROAR: Registry of Open Access Repositories
Promotes the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world

Search Engines

Google Scholar

This is the most common way of locating open access materials. As shown in the example below there will often be two links, one to the freely-available PDF version in an open access repository and the other to the published version, access to which will be dependent on a subscription:

The following are specific open access search engines:

CORE
Gives you access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from over 600 Open Access repositories.
Base Bielefeld
Access to millions of scholarly articles and other materials (e.g. theses) from more than 3,000 sources

Pre Print Archives

ArXiv
Open access to over 900,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics
SocArXiv
SocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.
bioRxiv
bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution.
OSF Preprints
The OSF is a free, open source service of the Center for Open Science, and provides a platform for many disciplinary preprint services including AgriXiv, PsyArXiv and SportRxiv.