Home / Search for Literature / Open Access Publishing

OMICS International (an amalgamation of Open Access Publications and worldwide international science conferences and events):
Open Access Journals Impact Factors. See especially:
! Geology & Earth Science Journals.
! Plant Sciences Journals.

SCImago Journal & Country Rank The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database (Elsevier).
Go to: ! Paleontology. Excellent!
! Especially worth checking out: Only Open Access Journals: Paleontology.

Hochschulbibliothek RWTH Aachen, Germany: Open Access: Die neue Art zu publizieren (in German).

Acta Palaeobotanica. Acta Palaeobotanica (now an open access journal) is an international journal publishing original palaeobotanical, palaeoecological, palaeophytogeographical and palynological papers, comprehensive review and discussion articles and book reviews.
Navigation from here.

The American Geological Institute (AGI): The GeoRef database, Open-Access Journals covered in GeoRef. Excellent!

! K. Antelman (2004): Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? Open access, Coll. Res. Libr., 65: 372-382.
"... The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. ..."

Archivalia (by Klaus Graf, Neuss, Germany): Webblog, in German.
Piraten im Dark Web befreien wissenschaftliche Literatur. Many weblinks, in German).

J. Beall:
Potential predatory scholarly open-access publishers.

L. Bénichou et al. (2018): Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF) best practices in electronic publishing in taxonomy. European Journal of Taxonomy 475: 1–37. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2018.475. See also here.

! Biodiversity Heritage Library. Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions have joined to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. The group is developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections. For the first time in history, the core of our natural history and herbaria library collections will be available to a truly global audience. Browse by titles, authors, subjects, names, map, or year.
Go to: Plants. Currently mor then 1500 titles tagged with "Plants". Superbly done!
Comment: Using "View text" is much quicker (for a first glance) then "View image".

BioMed Central. Publisher of 199 peer-reviewed open access journals.

! B.-C. Björk et al. (2009): Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PDF file, PLoS ONE 5. See also here.

H. Blattmann (2014): Massenmediale Logik in der Wissenschaft. PDF file, in German. GFZ Lectures, Potsdam, Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum, 31 p. https://doi.org/10.2312/GFZ.LECT.001.

K. Bosse and G. Beyer (2014), in German: Dr. Fantastic. ZEIT Campus, 6. See especially:
Was ist der "impact factor"?
Was bedeutet Open Access?
Was bringt "Research Gate"?

! D. Butler (2013): The dark side of publishing. In PDF, Nature.

Cambridge University Press:
! Open Access Glossary.

Ewen Callaway (2011): Fossil data enter the web period. Palaeontologists call for more sharing of raw information. Nature, 472.
Can be accessed through the internet wayback archive.

! Miguel Chavez: The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive. Access to many articles and books, e.g. via Library, and Books. Excellent!

D.S. Chawla (2017): Unpaywall finds free versions of paywalled papers. Nature, Toolbox.

Climate of the Past. An interactive open access journal of the European Geosciences Union. Navigate from Volumes and Issues or Title and Author Search.

Core. (you may be interested in the Wikipedia page).
CORE (COnnecting REpositories), a not-for-profit service, provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature, collecting and indexing research from repositories and journals.
CORE currently contains 281M open access articles collected from 11K data providers around the world.

Iain D. Craig et al. (2007): Do Open Access Articles Have Greater Citation Impact? A critical review of the literature. PDF file, Journal of Informetrics. See also here, or there (abstract).

M. Desai et al. (2023): Analyzing the Impact of Social Collaborations on Influence Identification in Scientific Literature Analytic: An Analysis on ResearchGate and Academia International Journal of Information Science, 21: 23-38.
"... Influence identification, one of the compelling applications of Social Network Analysis (SNA) is gaining immense attention in scientific literature analytics
[...] This research examines the impact of followers and followings on influence identification in the scientific domain
[...] The outcome suggested that, like SNA, social collaborations among researchers in terms of followers and followings significantly impact influence identification in the scientific domain ..."

DigiZeitschriften, Göttingen. The German digital journal archive, with costs. Some journals are free of charge, go to: Open Access.

! R. Dhar et al. (2022): The problem with APC and open access: Hurdles in publishing practice. Free access, Asian Journal of Medical Sciences, 13. See also here (in PDF):

DOAB. The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a service of OAPEN Foundation, an international initiative dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, based at the National Library in The Hague.
Go to: Browse by subject. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.

! DOAJ.
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

F. Dodds (2018): The changing copyright landscape in academic publishing. Open access, Learned Publishing, 31: 270-275.
"... This article marks the publication of the Tenth edition Clark’s Publishing Agreements: A book of precedents
[...] Academics continue to agree standard assignment contracts even where they disagree with the principles
[...] There is a complex range of researchers’ attitudes to copyright issues ..."

! Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that indexes and provides access to quality, peer reviewed Open Access research journals, periodicals and their articles' metadata.

! Electronic Journals Library, University Library of Regensburg, Germany.
The Electronic Journals Library is a service to facilitate the use of scholarly journals on the internet. It offers a fast, structured and unified interface to access full-text articles online. The journals are presented in lists sorted by research area. Excellent!
! Journal List by Title.
! Journal List by Subject.

M. Enserink (2018): European funders seek to end reign of paywalled journals. Abstract, Science, 61.
See also here Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, 2018. Platinum Open Access.

GeoZentrum Nordbayern, Erlangen:
! Journals for Paleontological Research. Peer-reviewed journals are listed by their impact factors and CiteScore Index on popular demand. Excellent!

EUROPA, the portal site of the European Union: The European Commission's Open Access Pilot for Research Articles: Frequently Asked Questions.

! Yassine Gargouri et al. (2010): Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. PDF file, PLOS ONE.

Geoberg.de (2010): Gerät das traditionelle Publikationssystem der Wissenschaft ins Wanken? In German. See also:
Open Access Petition an den Deutschen Bundestag.
Websites outdated. The link is to versions archived by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

! Geoscience e-Journals, the portal. This website incorporate peer-reviewed electronic journals in the field of Earth Sciences (geochemistry, geophysics, paleontology, regional geology, stratigraphy, geography, etc.) permitting free online access to all or at least a major part of their current issue and/or archives. Excellent!

! The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), funded by the Governments of Colombia, Denmark, Norway, and the United States Department of State. GOAP presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information in 158 countries worldwide.
See especially: Access by region.

! Google Scholar.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Focus also on fulltext search of open access journals and conference proceedings. Check out the nuts and bolts:
! Search Help.
For further information see here (Wikipedia entry).

! Important to know: Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters (configuring the meta-tags).

The Guardian:
When grades aren't enough: how to sell your academic brilliance (by Charlotte Jones, 2017).
Researchers: it's time to ditch the PDF (by Ijad Madisch, 2015).

Stevan Harnad and Tim Brody (2004): Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals.
Now recovered from the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

C. Hauschke (2016): Artikel bei ResearchGate und Co hochladen: Welcher Verlag erlaubt was? Und wie Open Access ist das eigentlich?. In German, Bibliblog der Hochschule Hannover.

U. Herb (2017): Open Access zwischen Revolution und Goldesel. Open access (in German), Information. Wissenschaft & Praxis 2017, 68: 1–10.

Ulrich Herb, Saarland University and State Library: Open Access - A Panacea? Science, Society, Democracy, Digital Divide.

! D.S. Himmelstein et al. (2018): Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. In PDF, PeerJ Preprints.

J. Howard (2008): U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Journal of Evolutionary Biology Research (JEBR). This is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed open access journal, published monthly by Academic Journals. JEBR is dedicated to increasing the depth of evolutionary biology research across disciplines with the ultimate aim of improving evolutionary research.

A.R. Kelly and M.K. Autry (2013): Access, accommodation, and science: Knowledge in an "open" world.
See also here.

! Kopernio (Clarivate Analytics). Kopernio is a free browser plug-in and web platform, powered by ground-breaking technology that enables one-click access to academic journal articles, across library subscriptions, publisher websites, OA repositories, databases and search engines. Worth to find out: Kopernio: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). See especially:
The New Plugins — What Goals Are the Access Solutions Pursuing? (by Kent Anderson, 2018, The Scholarly Kitchen).
Sie wollen den Turbo für Wissenschaftler im Netz bauen. In German.
Web of Science owner buys tool that offers one-click access to journal articles. Kopernio’s web-browser extension simplifies process of finding and legally downloading scholarly publications. (Nature, 2018).
Two New Services Aim to Improve Access to Scholarly PDFs (by Terry Ballard, 2017).

! W.J. Kress and L. Penev (2011): Innovative electronic publication in plant systematics: PhytoKeys and the changes to the "Botanical Code" accepted at the XVIII International Botanical Congress in Melbourne. In PDF, PhytoKeys, 6: 1-4.

! M. Lenzen-Schulte (2018): Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Artikeln: Sesam öffne dich. In German, Deutsches Ärzteblatt.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
One of the largest libraries in the world. Have a ook at the Wikipedia entry.

The Linnean Society, London, United Kingdom.
The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active society devoted to natural history. Go to:
Open Access Resources.

! E.C. McKiernan et al. (2016): How open science helps researchers succeed. elife.
"... We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices ..."

Florian Mann et al. (2008): Open Access Publishing in Science: Why It Is Highly Appreciated But Rarely Used. PDF file.

The Max Planck Society (2003): The Max Planck Society is a co-founder of the international Open Access movement:
! Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Open access means that scientific literature should be publicly available, free of charge on the internet so that those who are interested can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, refer to and, in any other conceivable legal way, use full texts without encountering any financial, legal or technical barriers other than those associated with Internet access itself.

! V. Meyer (2018), TU Berlin: Wege zu Open Access: Was kann jeder Einzelne von uns tun? In German.

D. Morse et al, (2009): Improving search in scanned documents: Looking for OCR mismatches. In PDF.

Zweigbibliothek Medizin der ULB Münster, Germany:
! Elf legale Wege an Elsevier-Artikel zu kommen, die nicht in Münster verfügbar sind (in German). Eleven legal ways to get Elsevier articles!

! G.F. Nane et al. (2023): COVID-19 and the scientific publishing system: Growth, open access and scientific fields. Open access, Scientometrics, 128: 345–362.

! N. Nastase (2017): The open access road to content. Library Trends.

Nature.com:
Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network (by Richard Van Noorden, August 13, 2014).

The New York Times:
A Facebook-Style Shift in How Science Is Shared (by Mark Scott, 2017).
Cracking Open the Scientific Process (by Thomas Linn, 2012).

Y. Niyazov et al. (2016): Open Access Meets Discoverability: Citations to Articles Posted to Academia.edu. PLoS ONE 11(2): e0148257. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0148257

Open Access (OA), developed collaboratively by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universities of Goettingen, Konstanz, and Bielefeld.
The information platform open-access.net satisfies the growing need for information on open access (OA) by gathering and bundling this information and processing it for various target groups and scenarios. Open access means free and unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly information. Excellent!
Go to: OA in individual disciplines,
! Geosciences,
! Biology.

OA Books.
The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague.
OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books. Worth checking out:
! OAPEN Library A central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books.
! Directory of Open Access Books A discovery service indexing OA books, in partnership with OpenEdition.

! The On-line Books Page (edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania).
An annotated index of more than 2000 books whose full text is available on-line. Search by author or by title.
The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet.

! Open Access Directory.
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. OAD is a wiki.

Open Access Library (OALib). OALib consists of the Search Engine of Open Access papers, the Journal with OALib Articles and the Index with metadata entries of external OA journal articles.

OpenAIRE.
OpenAIRE is a non-profit organization with a mission to promote open scholarship and improve discoverability, accessibility, shareability, reusability, reproducibility, and monitoring of data-driven research results, globally.
The organization operates a European e-infrastructure offering a diverse set of public services.

! OpenAlex (made by OurResearch with support from Arcadia).
OpenAlex (launched in January 2022) is an index of hundreds of millions of interconnected entities across the global research system. Please note:
Open Access Basics: Was ist OpenAlex? In German, by Philipp Falkenburg, 2022.
Also worth checking out: Wikipedia information about:
OpenAlex, and its forerunners:
Live Search Academic (existed from April 2006 to May 2008).
Microsoft Academic Search (retired in 2012, relaunched in 2016 as Academic).

OpenDOAR. Directory of Open Access Repositories.
OpenDOAR enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.

Pangea (hosted by Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen).
The information system Pangea is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research.

! H. Piwowar et al. (2018): The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. Open access, PeerJ, 6.

PLOS (Public Library of Science).
PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine.
You may be interested in the PLOS Wikipedia page.

PLOS (The Public Library of Science), San Francisco, California, USA. A nonprofit organization to accelerate progress in science.
! How to Choose the Journal That’s Right for Your Study.
! How to Write a Great Title.
! How to Write an Abstract.
! How to Write Your Methods.
! How to Write Discussions and Conclusions.
! How to Edit Your Work.
! 10 Tips for Getting Started as a Peer Reviewer.
! How to Read a Manuscript as a Peer Reviewer
! How to Write a Peer Review.

O. Pourret et al. (2020): International disparities in open access practices of the Earth Sciences community. Preprint.

! Public Library of Science (PLoS). "Open access means immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material, primarily peer-reviewed research articles in scholarly journals" (Wikipedia).

C. Rapple (2018): Understanding and supporting researchers’ choices in sharing their publications: the launch of the FairShare Network and Shareable PDF. In PDF, Insights, 31: 7, 1–7. See also here.

R. Regener (2024): Open Access Green und ResearchGate&xnbsp;– Wie sollten Bibliotheken damit umgehen? Free access, in German. Bibliotheksdienst, 58: 194–205.
"... The article advocates a better understanding of ResearchGate‘s success story in order to gain more insights for further improvements and optimization of our library services in the area of Green Open Access ..."

! The University Library of Regensburg, Germany: Electronic Journals Library, Geosciences. A comprehensive list of journals. Excellent!

RERO DOC (this is the digital library of RERO, the Library Network of Western Switzerland). RERO DOC has been created to promote, preserve and provide public access to the scholarly literature (electronic theses, dissertations and e-prints). In the framework of the Open Access initiative it provides a platform for researchers in member universities to self-archive their publications.

W.R. Riedel et al. (2006): Moving Fingers: Coming of Age: ISI & Googling. In PDF, Palaeontologia Electronica, 9.

S. Rumsey (2018): Discussion paper: Help! I’m an author – get me out of here. in PDF. Presentation given at STM Publishers event, London, 5th December 2017. See also here.

Science Books Online.
Science Books Online lists free science e-books, textbooks, lecture notes, monographs, and other science related documents. All texts are available for free reading online, or for downloading in various formats.

! V. Seer (2017): Von der Schattenbibliothek zum Forschungskorpus. Ein Gespräch über Sci-Hub und die Folgen für die Wissenschaft. In German.

C. Shen and B.C. Björk (2015): "Predatory" open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine, 13: 230.

! Peter Suber: Open Access Overview. Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints. An introduction to open access (OA) for those who are new to the concept. See as well:
Open Access News. News from the open access movement.

Aaron Tay, Singapore: Top new tools for researchers worth looking at.

R. Van Noorden (2014): Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network. Giant academic social networks have taken off to a degree that no one expected even a few years ago. Nature, 512.

! Vifabio, The Virtual Library of Biology (University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg, Frankfurt/Main, Germany): Electronic Journals.

! M. Voigt (C. Hauschke) (2016), Biblioblog der Hochschule Hannover: Artikel bei ResearchGate und Co hochladen: Welcher Verlag erlaubt was? Und wie Open Access ist das eigentlich? In German.

! R. Walker and P.R. da Silva (2015): The silent revolution in peer review. Frontiers Blog (Frontiers Communications in Open Science News).

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Category:Academic publishing.
Category:Open access (publishing).
Category:Open-access archives.
! Open access.
Open Access (in German).
Kopernio.
Sci-Hub.
Unpaywall.

! Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia:
Category:Academic publishing.
Category:Scholarly databases.
Category:Scholarly search services.
! List of academic databases and search engines.
List of online encyclopedias.

J. Willinsky 2005): Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing. In PDF, Open Journal System Demonstration Journal, 1.

A. Willis et al.(2009): Improving search in scanned documents: Looking for OCR mismatches PDF file). In: Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries 2009: ICSD - International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web, Trento, Italy.

! Wired:
The Internet Archive Is Making Wikipedia More Reliable. The operator of the Wayback Machine allows Wikipedia's users to check citations from books as well as the web (by Klint Finley, November 03, 2019).

University Library, Würzburg: Qualität von Open-Access-Zeitschriften. In German.

Z. Xu et al. (2024): What are the key factors influencing scientific data sharing? A combined application of grounded theory and fuzzy-DEMATEL approach. Open access, Heliyon, 10.
"... We combine grounded theory and information ecology theory to construct a relatively comprehensive and effective model for SDS [scientific data sharing] influencing factors ..."

Zeitschriftendatenbank ZDB (Staatsbibliothek Berlin and Deutsche Nationalbibliothek): Online-Zeitschriften nach Fachgebieten. A link directory about online journals free of charge (in German).

Zitteliana, the former "Mitteilungen der Bayerischen Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und historische Geologie". The journal series Zitteliana A and B are published by the Bavarian State Collection of Palaeontology and Geology, Munich.
Open online access to all published volumes.

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