Open Access: Open Access Publishing

Except for the sections on Creative Commons Licenses, The Public Domain, and Copyright, this Libguide Page has been borrowed from the Cornell University Library Open Access Publishing: Where to Publish page. It's licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The Sections on Creative Commons Licenses, The Public Domain, and Copyright have been borrowed from the Loyola Notre Dame Library Copyright Information Center Research Guide and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

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  ROAD

  ​ROAD synthesizes information about open access journals from a number of sources. Its base is a subset of the ISSN registry. Users may browse to find open access journals by country or by subject. Users may also search for an open access title by name, ISSN number, subject, or other concept.

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  Directory of Open Access Journals

  The Directory of Open Access Journals provides browseable lists of journals in many subjects.

• OAISter

  OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources. It was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide. Today, OAIster includes more than 25 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors. The records for these items are included in OCLC's Worldcat, but if you want to search just for open access content, you can do that through a separate OISter interface.
• OpenDOAR

  OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents.
• BASE

  BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is an online search tool for open access resources and documents. Hosted at the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, BASE harvests its data from open access scholarly repositories.
• Google Scholar

  Although it is not possible to limit search results to text materials licensed for re-use, Google and Google Scholar both index a large number of repositories and return open access results.
• PLoS
  Creative Commons licensed science journals.
• BioMed Central
  Creative Commons licensed medical journals.

• Ulrichsweb Serial Directory. A source of detailed information on more than 300,000 periodicals (also called serials) of all types: academic and scholarly journals, e-journals, peer-reviewed titles, popular magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and more.

• Pubmed Central. A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). 

• arXiv. An open-access pre-print repository of articles in the sciences.

• bioRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of biology articles.

• medRxiv. An open-access pre-print repository of health sciences articles.

What happens to my copyrights for my own published work? Every publisher has different policies in regards to self-archiving and your subsequent use of your published work. The SHERPA/RoMEO database provides a searchable collection of publisher policies--check here when deciding where to publish.

Data sharing is increasingly important in research and now often mandated by funding agencies. You can deposit your data in ScholarWorks@UMBC. However, there are many discpline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access, and using one of them may increase the chances that your data wil be found and re-used.  Here are some resources for finding open access repositories in which to deposit your datasets:

• re3data is a global list of data repositories. Be sure to read the terms of submission before attempting to deposit to see if there are limitations on who can deposit or fees.             
• Dryad is a data-sharing intitive that partners with publishers to host research data underlying scientific and medical publications.There is a fee for depositing data into Dryad.

You can make your research open access by publishing in an open access journal, or depositing your publication in an open access repository like ScholarWorks@UMBC.