Open access resources at the University of Redlands

On this second day of Open Access Week we're turning the spotlight on a couple tools you can use to tap into the universe of open access scholarly publishing.

Open access is commonly considered to have two "roads" for you to take as a researcher looking for a way to access the literature.

The "green road" of institutional repositories contains texts and other resources that scholars post themselves, often on a website or in an institutional repository.

The "gold road" of open access journals mimics the for-profit journals that Armacost Library subscribes to, often including rigorous peer review. Funding mechanisms vary, including - but NOT limited to - fees paid by authors or their home campus.

With that in mind, here are the tools:

The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) lists over 5,000 open access journals. You can browse the journals across 17 subject areas to find a journal covering the field you are studying, or search the articles by keyword. This resource is useful when you are looking for open access journals to publish in, or to browse through, and you don't know the journal by name already.

DOAJ is also part of the library's Index List of Full Text Journals, available from the right side of the library home page. If you search for a journal by title and it happens to be an open access journal, chances are that access will be listed through the Directory of Open Access Journals or Freely Available Journals collections.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) will soon make its appearance in our list of databases by title. This resource is hosted by a European research library and allows you to search at the item level through over 1700 content providers, including open access journals as well as institutional repositories and digital collections. Several content providers index non-textual materials as well. Preliminary testing shows it is even useful at retrieving those elusive theses and dissertations hosted in campus repositories. Give it a try and let us know what you think!