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.

• This is a list of tools, platforms, and services to help those who are learning and studying about, developing, or implementing OA.

• Related lists in OAD: Free and open-source tools for OA.

• For news about OA-related tools, including newly launched tools not yet listed here, follow the oa.tools tag of the Open Access Tracking Project.

• We'll soon add language on how this list compares with Free and open-source tools for OA.

• We're still in the middle of changing the section headings and classifying the tools.

• Alphabetical by category, and alphabetical within each category.

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Citation impact

• The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies
  • Host/developer: Steve Hitchcock
  • A continuously updated, annotated bibliography of studies on the effect of OA on downloads and citations, first launched in 2004.

• Open Citations Corpus (OCC)
  • Host/developer: Developed by JISC and now run by the Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA) (listed separately below).
  • OCC lets users grows citations to biomedical literature, select a given article, and see its citation network visually.

Current awareness

• Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
  • Host/developer: Peter Suber
  • OATP is a social-tagging project launched in 2009 to tag new OA developments and organize knowledge of the field. It produces feeds for those wishing to follow new developments on OA in general or on any OA subtopic, and stores its records for searching by tags and keywords. Initially it ran on Connotea (now defunct) and since 2012 has run on TagTeam (below).

• TagTeam (TT)
  • Host/developer: Peter Suber
  • This is an open-source social-tagging platform and feed aggregator developed by Peter Suber and the Harvard Open Access Project, first released in 2012. TagTeam lets users tag online resources; generate feeds of tagged items; organize social-tagging projects; curate tags through a flexible filtering system; store tag records for deduping, preservation, export, refinement, and boolean searching; aggregate feeds from other sources, including other tagging platforms; create custom feed remixes; and republish everything as HTML, Atom, RSS, XML, and JSON.

Directories

• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
  • Host/developer: Foundation
  • DOAB 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/developer: University of Lund; now run by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). (The IS4OA is listed separately below.)
  • DOAJ is a catalog of peer-reviewed OA journals, with external editors to remove untrustworthy journals. DOAJ also provides data on how many listed journals charge publication fees, how many use certain open licenses, and so on.

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
  • One of the SHERPA Services, run by the Centre for Research Communications, OpenDOAR “is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories,” each “visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here.” This directory is not automated, but carefully controlled for quality, and “allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria ... which can also be viewed as statistical charts.”

• Open Access Directory (OAD)
  • Host/developer: co-founded by Peter Suber and Robin Peek in 2008, and hosted at the College School of Library and Information Science.
  • OAD is an open-access, wiki-based, community-updated encyclopedia of OA, based on factual lists rather than articles.

• Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD)
  • 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.

• Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
  • Host/developer: University of Southampton UK
  • “The aim of ROAR is to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories throughout the world. Open access to research maximises research access and thereby also research impact, making research more productive and effective.” ROAR has produced not only a registry of institutional mandates around the world, via the ROARMAP (http://roarmap.eprints.org/), which is more of a list than a map, and the actual map Repistory 66 (http://maps.repository66.org/), a mashup of data from ROAR and OpenDOAR overlayed onto Google maps.

• SHERPA/FACT (Funders & Authors Compliance Tool)
  • Host/developer: University of Nottingham, Centre for Research Communications
  • One of many tools produced by SHERPA, FACT is “a tool to help researchers check if the journals in which they wish to publish their results comply with their funder's requirements for open access to research.” It combines and interprets data from JULIET and RoMEO and other sources, and offers authors advice.

• SHERPA/JULIET
  • Host/developer: University of Nottingham, Centre for Research Communications
  • Complementing the RoMEO service, JULIET provides summaries of funding agencies’ grant condition on self-archiving research publications and data. Also see the JULIET pamphlet.
  • JULIET Statistics provides data and graphics on funder OA policies.

• SHERPA/RoMEO
  • Host/developer: University of Nottingham, Centre for Research Communications
  • RoMEO is “a searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self-archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories,” which helps clarify what can be a confusing process for authors. The tool “contains publishers' general policies on self-archiving of journal articles and certain conference series. Each entry provides a summary of the publisher's policy, including what version of an article can be deposited, where it can be deposited, and any conditions that are attached to that deposit.” Entries are based on publisher's copyright transfer agreements, OA policies, and other publisher documents that are available online, along with personal communications with the publisher.
  • RoMEO Statistics provides data and graphhics on publisher OA policies.

Dissemination

• Academic Torrents
  • Host/developer: Paul Cohen and Henry Z Lo
  • The tool provides storage of all the data used in research. The data will be distributed by a torrent file distribution system. The team recommends the Transmission torrent client, which supports all major operating systems, to distribute and deliver the data at low cost. By facilitating file transfers, the journal can focus on its core mission of providing world class research. After peer review the paper can be indexed on this site and disseminated throughout our system. Files in any size can be disseminated as long as one person can become a seed for that data and be shared for a day or year.

Evaluations of OA journal quality

• Also see the Directory of Open Access Journals (above), which launched a program in January 2014 to weed out untrustworthy journals. See the August 2014 update on the program.

• Beall’s List of Publishers and Beall's List of Journals.
  • Host/developer: Jeffrey Beall
  • Beall lists OA publishers and journals he considers predatory or questionable.

• Peer Review Evaluation (PRE)
  • Hosts/developers: Adam Etkin, Eric Hall, Jason Etter

• Quality Open Access Market (QOAM)
  • Host/developer: Radboud University Nijmegen

Harvesters

• CORE
  • The source 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
  • 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
  • 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.

Open licenses

• Creative Commons
  • Host/developer: Creative Commons
  • Creative Commons(CC) is a non-profit organization that provides a public copyright license called Creative Commons Licenses (CC licenses). The licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators, and protect the people who use or distribute their work.

Other lists of tools

• 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.

Plagiarism detection

• Open Access Plagiarism Search
  • Host/developer: Institut für Betriebssysteme und Rechnerverbund and Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. This tool helps to detect plagiarism, but it can be used to discover related publications, too.

Policy and movement

• Global Open Access Portal (GOAP)
  • Host/developer: UNESCO.
  • GOAP is a knowledge portal that provides the following features:
    • Country-wise distilled knowledge on the status of Open Access
    • Key organizations engaged in OA in Member States
    • Thematic focus areas of OA
    • Important publications on OA coming from different regions of the world
    • Critical assessment of major barriers to OA in each country
    • Potential of OA in UNESCO Member States
    • Funding and deposit mandates
    • Links to OA initiatives in the world
  • It primary aims for policy-makers, advocates, and delegates from national, regional, and non-governmental organizations as well as members of OA communities.

• How Open Is It
  • This tool provides two services to measure how open a journal or article is. Open Spectrum (OAS) helps users to determine how open journals and journal articles are by identifying the core components of OA, and how they are implemented across the spectrum between open access and closed access. The latest addition is Open Article Gauge (OAG). It utilizes DOIs or PUbMedID to identify licensing information associated with the publications.

• MELIBEA
  • Host/developer: Team "Acceso Abierto a La Ciencia"
  • MELIBEA provides analysis of institutional OA policies of academic and research institutions, and funders. It helps policy-makers or members of OA communities to locate strong and weak points of institutional OA policies.

• OASIS
  • Host/developer: Swan and Leslie Chan
  • OASIS is OA reference resources to knowledge base of OA implementation, best practices, and successful outcomes of OA around the world.

• OER Policy Registry
  • Host/developer: Creative Commons
  • A database of active or proposed open education policies from around the world, where “anyone can easily share, update, and browse open education policies and legislation.” Users can browse by country, jurisdiction type, status, etc. The registry “define[s] OER policies as legislation, institutional policies, and/or funder mandates that lead to the creation, increased use, and/or support for improving OER.” It is not, however, a list of open projects, terms of use, or a registry of policies.

• Open Access Week
  • This annual event, held every fall, provides an “opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.” In addition to providing a platform to promote OA at the local level, the week is aimed at connecting local efforts with with global ones. Along with facilitating the annual week-long event, the site provides a year-long resource for OA and for connecting with others, through news, tools, groups, resources, etc.

Publishers: Cost Effectiveness

• Cost Effectiveness
  • It Enables authors or scholars to see what it is that they are paying for with their publication charges. It allows authors to decide which OA journals provide the most value per price.
  • Cost-effectiveness = 1000 x article influence/publication charges
  • Article influence scores only for journals listed in the Thomson-Reuters Journals Citation Report (JCR).

• Journal Cost-Effectiveness Search
  • It is a search engine for discovering internationally-published journals. Search results are ranked by price per article or citation from the ISI data (2007-11, 2013 prices). The sixth edition is the latest one. Summary statistics and explanations of methods and calculations are provided.

Miscellaneous

• Open Access Button
  • It is a tracking application that spots and visualizes whenever someone is denied access to a paper along with their location and story.

Search and discovery

• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
  • Host/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.

• Open Access Library (OALib)
  • 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
  • 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 Library
  • 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
  • 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.

• PeerLibrary
  • PeerLibrary is an open source project developing a collaborative online community where scholars and researchers can discover, read, and discuss scholarly literature all within one site. This project focuses on expediting access to publications, enabling public recordings of analysis and insights on said publications, and encouraging collaboration and openness in the development of science.

• ROAD
  • 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.

Tool developers

• Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA)
  • Host/developer: Interest Companies
  • IS4OA is currently developing or managing the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Open Citations Corpus (OCC), both of which are listed separately above.

• Open Access Toolset Alliance
  • Host/developer: Open Access Toolset Alliance
  • The alliance is a group of organizations and individuals who share several core goals which aim to create an open source toolset for OA scholarly publishing, to facilitate synchronous and asynchronous discussion and collaboration, and to distribute projects.