Open Access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors.
Note of Caution: Not all Open Access is Grey literature. Many of the articles found through DOAJ, etc have been peer reviewed and published in a journal (OA or not).
Open Access Resources:
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 100 million documents from more than 5,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 9000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.
DOAJ is a community-curated list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. To assist libraries and indexers keep their lists up-to-date, we make public a list of journals that have been accepted into or removed from DOAJ but we will not discuss specific details of an application with anyone apart from the applicant. Neither will we discuss individual publishers or applications with members of the public unless we believe that, by doing so, we will be making a positive contribution to the open access community.
Grey Matters: a practical tool for searching health-related grey literature, produced by CADTH, the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health.
In order to search for and retrieve the evidence base required to produce CADTH reports, the Information Services team has developed a grey literature checklist. Grey literature includes reports and government information that are not published commercially and that are inaccessible via bibliographic databases. The checklist is used to:
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
The Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository (Henderson Repository) is the only repository solely dedicated to sharing works created by nurses. It is an open-access digital academic and clinical scholarship service that freely collects, preserves, and disseminates full-text nursing research and evidence-based practice materials. The repository is a resource of the honor society of nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.
