"Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment."(SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
There are multiple ways for scholarly works to be open access:
-
Authors self-archive in repositories
Authors choose to self-archive a version of the published article (pre-print or post print) in a repository that is free to access
-
Open access journals
Articles are published in open access journals
-
Hybrid model
Authors choose to pay for their articles to be published open access in traditional publications
Authors self-archive in repositories
The repositories can be at institutional or central level, or can be specialized in a specific subject.
Central level repositories
-
NSF-PAR
Repository for all publications resulting from NSF-funded research
-
PubSpace
Repository for publications resulting from NASA-funded research.
-
PAGES
Search the DOE Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (DOE PAGES) for scholarly publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles and accepted manuscripts, resulting from DOE-funded research.
-
PubMed Central
Repository for publications resulting from NIH-funded research
-
ROSA P (Repository and Open Science Access Portal)
Public repository for National Transportation Library’s collection of over 30,000 items. Members of the transportation community and the general public can use ROSA P for all the open data and publications NTL acquires, manages and preserves for their benefit.
Institutional repositories
Discovering each institutional repository is a difficult task. Instead, it is recommended the use of specialized search engines to discover repositories of interest.
-
OpenDOAR
Directory of Open Access Repositories is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
-
OpenAire
OpenAIRE is a network of Open Access repositories, archives and journals that support Open Access policies. It is a project from the European Union with over 50 partners, from all EU countries, and beyond.
-
ROAR
Registry of Open Access Repositories is a searchable international registry of open access institutional repositories and their contents.
-
OAIster
OAIster is a union catalog of open access resources worldwide
-
BASE
One of the world's largest search engines for academic open access web resources.
-
Digital Commons Network
Brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
-
ArXiv
Open access to preprints in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, economics, and electrical engineering and systems science.
-
CiteSeer
Computer and information science
-
engrXiv Preprints
Dedicated to the dissemination of engineering knowledge quickly and efficiently
-
GitHub
Repository for open access software codes
Check this list for more disciplinary repositories:
Open access journals
Open access journals are journals freely available to readers. These journals are published by open access publishers or by traditional publishers.
Find open access journals titles from open access publishers:
Multidisciplinary open access journals
-
ACS Omega
ACS Omega is an open-access megajournal published by American Chemistry Society (ACS).
-
AIP Advances
An open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal published by the American Institute of Physics
-
BMJ Open
BMJ Open is an online, open access journal, dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and therapeutic areas
-
F1000 Research
Open science journal for life scientists with post publication peer-review
-
Heliyon
Open access mega journal published by Elsevier.
-
IEEE Access
IEEE Access is a multidisciplinary journal published by IEEE.
-
Nature Communications
Nature Communications is an open access journal that publishes high-quality research in biology, physics, chemistry, Earth sciences, and all related areas.
-
PLOS ONE
Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes several well-established open access, peer-reviewed journals covering an array of disciplines in the sciences including PLOS Biology, PLOS One, and PLOS Pathogens.
-
Royal Society Open Access
Open journal publishing research across all of science, engineering and mathematics
-
Scientific Reports
Scietific Reports is a multidisciplinary journal published by Nature.
See the list of open access journals published by major publishers
Hybrid journals
Publishers can offer a mix of traditional and open access articles or they offer free delayed access to their publications. See the individual journal home pages and check what articles are available for free.
