Open Access Collections
Contents:
Intro: Accessing E-Journals and E-books
The Mount Allison University Libraries provide digital access to thousands of subscription-based magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals. The content of these publications may be accessed via the library databases listed on the Find Articles page. You may also use Journal Finder to search for a particular journal, magazine or newspaper and to find out in which library database it is available.
The Mt.A Libraries also provide access to thousands of e-books via the Library Catalogue. These e-books may be accessed from off-campus via the E-Books Collections page.
In most cases, the publications available in the licensed databases and collections noted above are not freely available on the Internet. However, the number of open access scholarly resources available for free on the Internet is increasing. Below are selected collections of open access journals, digital repositories, and texts that are available for free on the Internet. Additional discipline-specific collections may be accessed via the Library Subject Guides.
Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable,
worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.
(Berlin Declaration on Open Access, 2003)
Open Access Journals and Periodicals
Open access journals, like traditional journals, receive and publish scholarly articles from researchers from a wide array of disciplinary backgrounds. Open access journals can be peer reviewed just like traditional journal publications.
Alternative Press Center
Directory of Periodicals
Links to journals and magazines covered by the Alternative Press Index.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
Searches academic open access web resources. Operated by Bielefeld University Library (Germany).
BioMed Central
BioMed central publishes 219 peer-reviewed open access journals in the subject areas of medicine, science, and technology.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of quality controlled scientific and scholarly open-access journals covering all subjects and languages. The directory includes over 8,000 journals, and over 3,950 of these are searchable at the article level (as of August 2012).
Highwire Free Online Full-text Articles
The largest repository of free, full-text, peer-reviewed content. Covers the life sciences, medical sciences, physical sciences and social sciences. Additional journals not freely available on this site are accessible via the Library's subscription to Highwire.
NewJour: Archive of Electronic
Journals & Newsletters
List of new ejournals and newsletters with alphabetical archive. Maintained by Ann Shumelda Okerson (Yale University) and James J. O'Donnell (Georgetown University).
OpenEdition
Multi-lingual portal devoted to the humanities and social sciences. Includes academic journals (in French and English, primarily), books, academic event announcements and scholarly blogs.
Oxford Open Acess Journals
Scholarly and Peer Reviewed open access journals covering a range of content from Oxford Press.
Journal/Publisher Open Access Policies
Sherpa/RoMEO
Search by publisher name, journal title, or archiving policy category to find a summary of permissions normally given as part of a publisher's copyright transfer agreement. A useful tool to supplement information provided by individual publishers and journals.
Digital Repositories
Digital repositories, like open access journals, provide free online access to scholarly work. Subject based repositories provide access to collections of works related to a specific research area, and institutional repositories represent a sample of the research output of a particular university.
Subject Based Repositories
AgEcon
A repository of scholarly literature in agricultural and applied economics
arXiv
Provides open access to over half a million e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Operated by Cornell Universitiy.
dLIST
A repository for Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, and Museum Informatics.
E-LIS
Provides open access to papers in Library and Information Science.
philpapers
A directory of online articles and books by academic philosophers. Note that not all of the materials in philpapers are free, though you may be able to access this material through the lirbary's subscription databases.
PubMed Central
Digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). See also PubMed Canada.
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
Disseminates working papers, journal articles, book chapters, and software components about Economics
SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network)
Facilitates rapid access to papers published in various subjects in Social Sciences, Business and Management, and Humanities.
Institutional Repositories
There are a wide range of institutional repositories representing some of the scholarly output of universities and academic institutions around the world. One way of accessing these resources is to visit the library web pages of these institutions. However, the general repository directories and search engines listed below also provide access to these repositories.
General Repositories, Search Engines and Directories
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
An authoritative directory of academic open access repositories
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
A Web-based finding aid for locating open access repositories in different subject areas
Carl Harvester
A search engine for major digital repositories in Canada
Global Access Portal
The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), funded by the Governments of Colombia, Denmark, Norway, and the United States Department of State, presents a current snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world.
Google Scholar
Searches scholarly literature across a variety of sources, including journal articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
Open Data
Open Data is a part of the concept of Open Government. It means that governments provide public access to government-managed datasets in useable formats (i.e. raw, machine-readable) so that anyone can use the data for building applications, research, analysis or other uses. The idea is to create greater transparency in government so that citizens in a democracy are able to hold their governments accountable, and to expand the creative use of data for the public good.
Using Open Data
A 5-min. TED Talk by Tim Berners-Lee describes some examples of what people have done with open data.
Open Data Portal
Canada’s 12-month Pilot Project
(Launched March 17, 2011)
DataBC
First provincial government in Canada to provide an open data portal
(Launched July 2011)
DATA.GOV
U.S. open data site
(Launched May 2009)
Data.Gov.Uk
UK open data site
(Launched in Jan. 2010)
Open Access E-Books and Texts
Bartelby.com: Great Books Online
Classics of British and American literature, nonfiction, and reference
works.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Directory of open access books published by academic publishers.
Google Books
Access the full text of public domain books and snippets and previews of copyrighted books. Also includes magazines.
Hathi Trust
A digital repository aiming to archive and make available the digitized collections of libraries around the world.
It is important to note that many items in the Hathi Trust collection are not available in their entirety.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 36,000 high quality free ebooks to download to your PC, Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Android or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats.
The On-Line Books
Page
A searchable index and links to thousands of online books. Choose "Archives"
for other large collections of online texts.
Suggest a collection or other open access resource for this page.
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