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)

http://www.base-search.net/

• 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)

http://www.doabooks.org/

• Host/initiator/developer: Foundation

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)

http://www.doaj.org/

• 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

http://is4oa.org/

• Host/initiator/developer: Interest Companies

Helps to discover and locate OA publications. It can be integrated in library catalogs or web portals.

Open Access Library (OALib)

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

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

http://tagteam.harvard.edu/

• 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.

Help/Advice for Licensing

Creative Commons

http://creativecommons.org/

• Host/initiator/developer: Commons

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.

Policy and Movement

Global Open Access Portal (GOAP)

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/portals-and-platforms/goap/

• Host/initiator/developer: and Information, UNESCO

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 for policy-makers, advocates, and delegates from national, regional, and non-governmental organizations as well as members of OA communities.

MELIBEA

http://www.accesoabierto.net/politicas/default.php

• Host/initiator/developer: Team "Acceso Abierto a La Ciencia

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

http://www.openoasis.org/

• Host/initiator/developer: Swan and Leslie Chan

Is OA reference resources to knowledge base of OA implementation, best practices, and successful outcomes of OA around the world.

OER Policy Registry

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OER_Policy_Registry

• Host/initiator/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

http://www.openaccessweek.org/ 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.

Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

http://roar.eprints.org/

• Host/initiator/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)

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/fact/

• Host/initiator/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

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/

• Host/initiator/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. Statistical information about researchers’ OA policies are also presented visually at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/stats.php?la=en&mode=simple. More info: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/documents/RoMEO_JULIETLeaflet.pdf

SHERPA/RoMEO

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/

• Host/initiator/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 several charts with a breakdown of the journal policies in the database, by country and by type of self-archiving policy, among other things: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php?la=en&fIDnum=%7C&mode=simple

Plagiarism detection

Open Access Plagiarism Search

http://oaps.eu/project/overview/

• Host/initiator/developer: Institut für Betriebssysteme und Rechnerverbund (http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de) and Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (http://www.ptb.de)

Is plagiarism detection service. It can be used to discover related publications, too.

Publishers of Gold Open Access

Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2013

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/12/06/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers-2013/

• Host/initiator/developer: Jeffrey Beall

Consists of questionable individuals journals and publishers that adopt the gold OA model, author processing fees.

Publishing Platforms

Open Access Toolset Alliance

http://www.oatools.org/

• Host/initiator/developer: Open Access Toolset 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. The toolset for publishing includes:

• • Ambra is an innovative Open Source platform for publishing Open Access research articles. It provides features for post-publication annotation and discussion that allows for a “living” document around which further scientific discoveries can be made. The platform is in active development by the PLOS (Public Library of Science) and is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
  • Fidus Writer is an online collaborative editor especially made for academics who need to use citations and/or formulas.
  • tei2wikitext is a draft translation from TEI (a popular XML format for encoding book contents) and WikiText (the language used to encode semantic information in Wikipedia and related systems).
  • meTypeset is a docx/odt to TEI to NLM-XML typesetter. It is based upon the oxGarage stack and the aim of producing compliant JATS/NLM XML markup on an automated basis from input documents.

Quality Open Access Market

http://www.qoam.eu/ A resource for authors who want to publish their article in open access in a high-quality journal and for a reasonable price. One of the site’s chief tools is its Journal Score Card, “a questionnaire resulting in subscores for five critical aspects of a journal.” These five aspects are editorial information, peer review, governance, process, and valuation. Each aspect has several components, which are rated on scale of 1 to 5. The lowest subset of the first four aspects is the Base Score, which is used to rank journals. The fifth aspect, valuation, provides an additional score shown beside the Base Score.

Storage

Academic Torrents

http://academictorrents.com/

• Host/initiator/developer: Paul Cohen and Henry Z Lo

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.

Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)

http://www.opendoar.org/

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.”