Tools for OA
This list is part of the Open Access Directory.
- This list is still under development. Every part of it may change before the official launch, including its title, URL, and method of organization. The list consists of platforms, best practices, and services that help and guide those who are learning and studying about, developing, or initiating OA.
- This list contains notable tools both for those looking for OA research and for those producing it.
- For researchers, the list contains numerous databases, indexes, news sources, and other tools for opening and facilitating research process.
- For authors, information is provided for learning more about OA repositories and policies.
- Indexes and maps providing a comparative and global perspective on OA, along with funding sources for OA research, will be of use to both.
- The list is arranged alphabetically by categories; what each tool is for.
Discovering and Disseminating
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
- Host/initiator/developer: Bielefeld University Library
BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. It is a search engine normalized and indexed data from more than 2,700 academic OA web resources used Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Seventy percent of the full texts is indexed. The Index is continuously enhanced by integrating further OAI sources as well as local sources. It is a part of Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER). Database managers can integrate the BASE index into your own local infrastructure (e.g. meta search engines, library catalogues) via an interface.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- Host/initiator/developer: OAPEN Foundation (http://www.oapen.org/home)
Is a directory of OA books. Libraries can integrate the directory into their webpac or online catalogs. DOAB helps to increase discoverability of OA books.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Host/initiator/developer: DOAJ
Is a one-stop shop for searching and discovering OA scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.
Infrastructure Services for Open Access
- Host/initiator/developer: Community Interest Companies (https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-regulator-of-community-interest-companies)
Helps to discover and locate OA publications. It can be integrated in library catalogs or web portals.
===Open Access Library (OALib)=== DISCOVERY AND DISSEMINATING (PUBLISHING PLATFORM) http://www.oalib.com/ A shared academic database that aims to be both an academic search engine and a publisher. Researchers can search, submit, and recommend papers for free. So far, OALib has indexed over 2 million OA papers, but the tool does not include filtering options based on journal, peer review, etc.
Open Access Map
http://www.openaccessmap.org/ This service from OASIS, in partnership with Open Society Foundations, EnablingOpenScholarship, EIFL, and SPARC, attempts to provide “a single location where OA initiatives can be discovered.” The map case be searched or used to get an overview of OA developments and initiatives around the world, including funding policies, government documents, university mandates, etc. It is hoped that the tool “can be used for OA education training and advocacy and should be extremely valuable in informing different constituencies, including policymakers and legislators, about the progress of OA in simple, clear and easily usable ways.”
Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD)
http://oatd.org/ A resource for finding OA graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. OATD currently indexes 2,060,382 electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), along with metadata from over 1,000 colleges, universities, and research institutions (a select list is available here: http://oatd.org/oatd-publishers.html). Some of the records come directly from institutional repositories, while others come from regional or national consortia, or from a set of catalog records provided by OCLC Worldcat. OATD does not host the full text of ETDs, but rather indexes about the first 30 pages of some theses to show search hits. Publishers of Gold Open Access Journals: any sources that provide list of publishers that charge for publishing
Open Library
https://openlibrary.org/ Providing over a million free titles, and 20 million records from various catalogs, this site’s motto is, “One web page for every book.” Open Library, a project of the non-profit Internet Archive and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation, aspires to be truly open in every way: “the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution.” An additional feature is the use of statistical and graphic data on collections, use, and community activity. Unfortunately, the site can be misleading at first, as not every work with record is available electronically, and even for free.
Open Science Framework SciNet
DISCOVERY AND DISSEMINATING (HARVESTER?) http://scinet.osf.io/ Not only is much research locked behind tolls, but so are the citations in that research. In response, this crowd-sourced effort uses the open source Citelet extension for Chrome to compile a “comprehensive metadata dataset of scientific citations and corresponding references to unlock the citation network.” Citelet first determines whether a given article has extractable metadata, then whether database has it; if not, Citelet captures the citation and reference information and sends it all to the system for processing and storage.
ROAD
http://road.issn.org/ This directory of resources is a “service offered by the ISSN International Centre with the support of the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO.” It provides free access to a subset of the ISSN Register, comprising “bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access which have been assigned an ISSN by the ISSN Network.” Records can currently be downloaded as a MARC XML dump and will be available as RDF triples in 2014. “The bibliographic records have been enriched by metadata about the coverage of the resources by indexing, abstracting, citation databases, registries and journals indicators.” The purpose of ROAD is 1) to provide a single access point to different types of global online scholarly resources; 2) to provide information about the use of the OA resources identified by an ISSN in the scholarly community; 3) to give an overview of global OA scholarly production; and 4) to demonstrate new ways of using the ISSN for compiling information from various sources.
TagTeam
- Harvard University
Formerly known as the OA Tracking Project (OATP) (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/OA_tracking_project), this open-source social-tagging platform and feed aggregator is now part of the Harvard Open Access Project. TagTeam aggregates anything that publishes RSS, creates custom feed remixes, curates tags via a flexible filtering system, and republishes everything as Atom, RSS, XML, and json. More information: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/Intro_to_TagTeam
Funding
Tools for Open Science | OKF Open Science Working Group
http://science.okfn.org/tools-for-open-science/ Not a tool, but a list of tools and services scientists can use to open their science in the following categories: sharing data, crowdsourcing science, crowdfunding science, and collaborating and reproducing previous studies. Some are only targeted to certain fields of science, but some are more general. Open Science Working Group, which produced the list, focuses on three “open” areas: data, access, and research. The group builds tools, apps, datasets, and guidelines to facilitate all
Harvesters
CORE
http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/search "Aggregates content from several million scientific from hundreds of OA repositories. It offers five applications: CORE Portal-allows to search and navigate scientific publications. CORE Plugin-enables users to search for related scientific publications. CORE Mobile-enables users to search and download OA articles. It's compatible with Android OS only. CORE API-enables external systems and services to interact with the CORE repository Repository Analytics-enables users to monitor the ingestion of metadata and content from repositories and provides a wide range of statistics"
JISC Open Citations
http://opencitations.net/ Funded by JISC’s jiscEXPO strand and undertaken by Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, this is a database of biomedical literature citations, harvested from the reference lists of all open access articles in PubMed Central. Open Citations allows users to browse bibliographic records and citations, to select individual articles, and to visualize its citation network in a variety of displays. Global in scope, the tool aims “to change the face of scientific publishing and scholarly communication.” Project blog: http://opencitations.wordpress.com/
Open Access Now
http://oanow.org/ This site provides current news about OA and scholarly publishing, and aims to centralize and aggregate material published online and in print. The content, which can be searched or aggregated with an RSS feed, has been sorted, nominated, and published by members of Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions.