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Open Access in Depth: Journals

This is a guide for issues surrounding the open access movement. It also includes links to open access resources, projects and repositories.

OA Journal Information & Directories

A searchable database of freely available, peer-reviewed full text journals covering all scholarly disciplines.

Click here to search or browse the directory.

OA Science Journals

PubMed Central is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

 

Public Library of Science is a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license.

 

BioMed Central is a scientific publisher specializing in open access journal publication. BioMed Central and its sister companies Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central publish over 200 scientific journals.

Publishers and Practices to Avoid

Jeffrey Beall's List of Predatory Publishers (Archived)

Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian at the University of Colorado, maintained a list of predatory publishers and suspect journals until January 2017.

Funded in part by the Directory of Open Access Journals, "ThinkCheckSubmit" maintains a helpful checklist for determining if a journal can be trusted.

Questions and Concerns

Steven Harnad's writings on the "self-archiving initiative" outline the rationales for posting scholarly work in a green open access repository.

Journal Publisher Policies regarding Open Access

A searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories.

Click here to access the database.

Citation Impact Studies

Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool

The Open Access Spectrum (OAS) Evaluation Tool helps assess a journal's degree of openness across a range of criteria. This independent measure can be of crucial benefit to authors, libraries, research funders, government agencies, and other interested parties. The OAS Evaluation Tool aims to provide unprecedented insight and transparency into scholarly journals' degree of openness.