LibGuides: Open Education Resources (OER): Open Access

Why Open Access?

Publishing Open Access:

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A list of over 6500 available OA journals, in all disciplines.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
Open Access Directory
The Open Access Directory is a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship.
OpenDOAR
Search through the world's repositories of freely available academic research information.
Open Journal Systems
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals. Originally developed and released by PKP in 2001 to improve access to research, it is the most widely used open source journal publishing platform in existence, with over 10,000 journals using it worldwide.
Open Science Directory
Search tool for open access journals developed by EBSCO and the Hasselt University Library.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

Basically, open access (OA) means access to scholarly works in the open - on the open Web.

OA removes price barriers (subscriptions, licensing fees, pay-per-view fees)
OA removes permission barriers (most copyright and licensing restrictions)
OA journals, like traditional journals, use contracts with authors to secure the needed permissions and avoid infringement. A common way for copyright holders to show their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses or one of the many other open licenses.