This week is the first International Open Access Week. As the organizers say, “Open Access Week is an opportunity to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.”
While the traditional model of production and dissemination of scholarly and expert research is going strong (we need only witness the continuing, increasing costs of our subscription scholarly journals and research databases), the Open Access movement is gaining stride to remove many of the cost barriers to access to research literature. You can read more about Open Access and Open Access Week here.
The Duggan Library uses and provides access to several Open Access resources, and many more can be found by searching “open access journals.” Here are just a few to get you started.
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
Includes over 4000 scientific and scholarly journals
Highwire Press
A division of the Standford University Libraries, enabling free access to peer-reviewed journals