This blog post is a part of the International Open Access Week blog series.
Thanks to Open Access (OA), scientists, health care professionals, libraries, and institutions facing budget limitations can access scholarly publications at little or no cost. Claire Guimbert, Research Librarian in ITS Knowledge and Information has gathered just a few of the many resources from outside the World Bank that our library staff has found helpful:
Journals:
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): www.doaj.org
DOAJ contains over 8,000 OA journals of varying open access policies that scholars can search and browse.
African Journals Online (AJOL): https://www.ajol.info/
AJOL is the world's largest and pre-eminent collection of peer-reviewed, African-published scholarly journals with 521 Journals, including 220 Open Access Journals
Books:
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): www.doabooks.org
DOAB aims to increase the discoverability of Open Access books. It is open to all publishers of OA academic, peer reviewed books.
Grey literature:
OpenGrey: www.opengrey.eu
Open access to 700, 000 bibliographical references of grey literature (technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, some conference papers, some official publications) produced in Europe. OpenGrey covers Science, Technology, Biomedical Science, Economics, Social Science and Humanities.
Repositories:
The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR): www.opendoar.org
OpenDOAR is a quality-controlled directory of academic open access repositories
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI): www.openarchives.org
OAI lists 2937 conforming repositories and provides access to millions of resources from a single online location.
International Organizations:
OpenUNDP: www.open.undp.org/#2017
OpenUNDP presents detailed information on over 4000 UNDP projects in 170 countries and territories worldwide.
USAID DEC Clearinghouse (DEC): https://dec.usaid.gov/dec/home/Default.aspx
DEC, the largest online resource for USAID-funded technical and project materials, makes nearly 200,000 items available for review or download, and continuously grows.
Data:
FAOSTAT: www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home
FAOSTAT provides free access to food and agriculture data for over 245 countries and territories and covers all FAO regional groupings from 1961 to the most recent year available.
Science and Medicine:
The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI): www.who.int/hinari/en
Hinari set up by the World Health Organization together with major publishers, enables low and middle income countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature.
Public Library of Science (PLOS): www.plos.org
PLOS was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit Open Access publisher, innovator and advocacy organization with a mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE): www.base-search.net
BASE operated by Bielefeld University Library in Germany is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources that provides more than 100 million documents from more than 5,000 sources. 60 per cent of BASE full text indexed documents are Open Access.
Economics and Development:
Research Papers in Economics (RePEc): www.repec.org
RePEc is a collaborative effort of over 90 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences.
Environment:
Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE): https://www.unep.org/oare/
OARE, led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world’s largest collections of environmental science research.
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