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Open Access: OA Resources

Open Access Initiatives

CHORUS -  Advancing Public Access to Research.
DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment) - Improving how research is accessed.
FOOA: Fair Open Access Alliance - This organization is comprised of a group of scholars and librarians aiming to help transform the conventions of scholarly publishing, and return control of the publication process to the scholarly community.  
Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) - Collaboration between scholarly publishers, infrastructure organizations, librarians, researchers and other interested parties to advocate and promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world's scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters, in trusted repositories where they are open and machine-accessible.
HOAD (Hybrid Open Access) - This data analytics tool showcases how open hybrid journals in transformative agreements are. Drawing on multiple open data sources, including Crossref, OpenAlex and the cOAlition S Journal Checker Tool, up-to-date data is presented. This dashboard can help answer questions such as (1) How much content in hybrid journals is already published openly under a Creative Commons license? (2) What is a country’s share of output in hybrid journals compared to other countries? (3) Are publishers making metadata openly available, and if not, where are the gaps?
OA Switchboard - This initiative is a "not-for-profit collaboration between funders, institutions and publishers to provide essential infrastructure, standards and back office services to facilitate the fulfilment of open access strategies across business models, policies and agreements."
Open Access Week - A global event scheduled each year in October promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.
Open Science - An effort to share scientific research and technology through Open publishing.
OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy): Report to Congress (2023) on Financing Mechanisms For Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research. The Committee expressed concern about how mechanisms for financing open access publishing “may present growing barriers to knowledge generation and sharing,” noting that there are “limited data on the subject.”
Plan S - Supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. This plan requires that, from 2021, scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. In addition, cOAlition S has provided information about price transparency requirements.
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science - Defines shared values and principles for Open Science, and identifies concrete measures on Open Access and Open Data, with proposals to bring citizens closer to science and commitments to facilitate the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge around the world. 

Open Access Resources

COAR - Confederation of Open Access repositories.
Creative Commons - Provides free licenses that enable authors to control copyright.  FAQ about CC.
OASIS - Open standards. Open source.
OASPA - Community of Open Access journal publishers whose members adhere to a Professional Code of Conduct.
Open Access Directory - Listing numerous OA resources  and terms, composed by Simmons College.
Peter Suber - A leading voice in the Open Access movement.
Sherpa/Juliet - Grant funders' publishing requirements for authors who've received grant awards.
Sherpa/Romeo - Database of publishers' policies, in particular for self-archiving.
SPARC - Provides a free author addendum to enable authors to modify copyright.
SPARC, Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) - Brings together representatives from North American universities with established faculty open access policies and those in the process of developing such policies.

Open Access Tools

EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio) for libraries - Browser plugin that can bring legal open access content into your workflows.
Open Access Button - Search for full text legal research articles or automatically request from authors.
ScienceOpen - Search for full text articles.
Unpaywall -  Find full text content from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves.

Open Access Directories

DOAB - directory of Open Access books.
DOAJ - directory of Open Access journals.
OpenDOAR - directory of Open Access Repositories.
ROAD - directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources.
ROAR -  registry of Open Access repositories.

Open Access Repositories

The following are a few Open Access/Public Access repositories.  If you would like to see one added to this list, please contact the MSK Library Guide author.

arXiv - Open access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
bioRxiv - Open access archive covering such fields as biochemistry, bioinformatics, cancer biology, cell biology, developmental biology, genomics, immunology, molecular biology, neuroscience, and many more.
Dryad - General-purpose repository that makes scholarly research data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable.
FigShare - Researchers can provide open access to their work for others to view and download. Any type of data can be shared and many file types can be previewed in the browser. There does exist a paid version.
Minority Health and Health Equity Archive - Online repository of materials related to minority health and health equity.
OSF (Open Science Framework) - Open platform to support research and enable collaboration.
PMC (PubMed Central) - PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
Europe PMC - Offers free access to biomedical literature resources including PMC, patent abstracts and more.
Zenodo - CERN Data Centre-backed research data repository for the long-tail of science, enabling researchers to preserve and share their research output from any science, regardless of the size and format.