All this week we have been talking about Open Access and the benefits of sharing your work – but there is one more benefit for you!
The fact that everyone else is making work Open Access too!
Today we are looking at where you can go to find OA resources for yourselves, and what you can do with them!
Finding OA resources
You can find OA journals and articles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, known as DOAJ. DOAJ contains over 12,000 OA journals, and more than 9,000 of them can be searched by article – that’s over 3 million Open Access articles!!
Increasingly books and book chapters are being made OA, sometimes on repositories (see below) but they can also be found on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) or the OAPEN Library, depending on the terms under which they are made open. Some Open Access books and monographs can also be found on LibrarySearch!
You can also find and use Open Access data online. There is a Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) that allows you to find repositories to search, but there are also lists provided by the Digital Curation Centre of recommended repositories in the UK.
Last but by no means least, there are the repositories hosted at other universities. We at Greenwich have GALA, and every university in the UK has their own repository that is used for the sae purpose – to make versions of works by their academic staff Open Access. You can search OpenDOAR for a specific repository or try out some new tools that have just been released: OA Button and Unpaywall. Both of these tools allow you to search for a legal, freely available copy of a paper online. OA Button does it using a reference copied into its website, and Unpaywall uses a browser extension. They are both new tools so not 100% guaranteed, but they are worth trying out!
Understanding licensing
Open Access content is free to read, but you need to be aware that there may be some limitations on what you are able to do if you want to re-use the content you find. Open Access content, especially that produced in an academic context is usually given a licence of some sort, you will probably recognise codes like CC-BY, CC-0 or CC-BY-NC-ND.
These codes represent licenses given by Creative Commons, and the different sections relate to limitations or specifications about what actions you can take with the content, for example CC-BY means you can re-use the content in any way you like, but you must attribute the original back to where it came from.
For full details of all the various Creative Commons licenses and what they mean (they all say you can re-use things, its just the details that vary!), visit the Creative Commons website.