PSCC Libraries: Open Educational Resources (OER): OER Library Resources

Open Access Advocacy in Academia

SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Right to Research Coalition
Student advocacy group
How journals like Nature,Cell and Science are damaging science
by Randy Schekman, 2013 Nobel prize winner

Subject Librarian

Mary Ellen Spencer

Email Me

Contact:

ER125

(865) 694-6517

Open Access

Open academic journals contain articles that are peer-reviewed and often have boards of editors controlling content.

Open Access

DOAJ
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a comprehensive directory to OA journals that use a quality control system to guarantee content.
PLoS
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit publisher of OA journals about science and medicine
Springer Open
Offers 160+ OA journals across all areas of science
BioMed Central
BioMed Central publishes 258 peer-reviewed, OA journals in Science, Technology and Medicine
Wiley Open Access journals
Biological, chemical and health sciences
arXiv
OA to e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, finance and statistics. Maintained by Cornell University Library
SAGE open
The publisher SAGE's OA journal concentrates on social / behavioral sciences and the humanities
EconPapers
Initiative of Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), this provides thousands of economics journal articles, books, software items, and working papers
Social Sciences Research Network
Dedicated to social science research, SSRN partners with major universities to quickly disseminate new research. It also links to a number of specialized research networks

These collections contain a combination of classic books that have passed into the public domain and new books published with creative commons licenses.

DOAB
The Directory of Open Access Books is curated by the same organization that provides the Directory of Open Journals. It aims to be a comprehensive guide to freely available books
Project Gutenberg
Thousands of titles available for free download
HathiTrust
Hathitrust is a digital preservation project that collects material from both academic institutions and open web sources like the Internet Archive.
The Online Books Page
Over 1 million books available
Humanities Text Initiative
Full-text sources in humanities and social history. From the University of Michigan
Open Humanities Press
Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide.

OA collections contain many different types of information in the public sphere. Below are just a few examples of excellent sources for education.

Biodiversity Heritage Library
Collaborative effort to make biodiversity literature openly available. Contains articles, illustrations, books, maps, and other types of media
USGS Publication Warehouse
Thousands of resources from US Geological Survey scientists and library. Historical and current material available
Internet Archive
Contains books, articles, music and videos as well as the Way Back Machine
World Digital Library
WDL contains significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world, like Medieval manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other cultural artifacts
National Gallery of Art (Open Access)
The NGA has released thousands of digital images of artwork now in the public domain.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Met has released nearly 400,000 hi-resolution images from its vast collection. The images are free to download and use for non-commercial purposes.
American Memory: Remaining Collections
Hosted by Library of Congress, the American Digital Collection provides access to a number of collections about American history and culture. It uses historical images, sound recordings, and film recordings to document significant national events. Collections are put together by theme to form online exhibits. Most content is free of copyright restrictions.