Open Access Resources

The Open Access movement aims to make research articles in all academic fields freely available online. This is done through the development of Open Access repositories and Open Access Journals.

Open Access allows academics and scientists in developing and transition countries to not only access the material which they need to conduct their research, but provides a means by which they can more efficiently contribute their important work to the global research community. Through the new eIFL-Open Access Program, eIFL.net members will build capacity on the issues related to Open Access to enable members to benefit from the content which is made freely available through Open Access as well as ensuring that the local content produced within their countries is widely distributed. This is accomplished through the development of Open Access repositories and by encouraging authors within the countries to publish their articles in Open Access journals.

This research guide was developed by Anita Johnson, IMF-World Bank Library Network

In celebration of International Special Librarians Day – April 6, 2006 – DC/SLA

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition): http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/index.html

Public Knowledge Open Access Project: http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/openaccess

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI4): http://oai4.web.cern.ch/OAI4/ (presentation abstracts and streaming of presentations very informative)

JISC Briefing Paper on Open Access: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/JISC-BP-OpenAccess-v1-final.pdf

Guide to Institutional Repository Software: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

Research resources for librarians in developing countries; Especially for institutions, governments and nongovernmental organizations in low-income and low-middle income countries.

DOAJ covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, aiming to cover all subjects and languages. As of February 2006, there are 20014 journals in the directory.

Provides access to citations and fulltext of over 230 African journals covering most subject areas. AJOL also offers a document delivery service which is free to users and participating journals. Document delivery requests from outside of developing countries are not free.

Features 30 peer-reviewed journals from

Brazil

Cuba

India

Indonesia

Kenya

South Africa

Uganda

, and

Zimbabwe

. Subjects include: health (tropical medicine, infectious diseases, epidemiology, emerging new diseases), biodiversity, environment, conservation and international development).

University Library of Regensburg offers the "Electronic Journals Library," which contains over 25,000 titles, of which over 10,500 journals can be read free-of-charge.

Highwire facilitates access to over 1.1 million full text scholarly articles on medical/biomedical topics. Most journal titles covered include back issues older than 12-24 months.

f. Scholarly Journals Distributed via the World Wide Web (University of Houston Libraries)

Provides links to established Web-based scholarly journals that offer access to English language articles. No user registration or fees required.

B. Journals Accessible Freely for selected developing countries - some may require registration

eIFL.net is an independent foundation that strives to lead, negotiate, support and advocate for the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transition and developing countries. Its main focus is on negotiating affordable subscriptions on a multi-country consortial basis, while supporting the enhancement of emerging national library consortia in member countries.

AGORA provides free access to more than 500 journals from major scientific publishers in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science, and related social sciences. AGORA is available to students and researchers in qualifying not-for-profit institutions in eligible developing countries. For more information, contact agora@fao.org

The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) provides free or very low cost online access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, non-profit institutions in developing countries. As of February 2006, over 3100 journals are accessible thru HINARI.

OARE is being developed under the sponsorship of the United Nations Environment Programme with infrastructure provided by Yale University. OARE is scheduled to be launched in January 2007.

Highwire press provides a list of journals offering free online access to developing economies. Individual publishers use the World Bank's list of low income economies for determining access. You do not need to register for this service as highwire software automatically detects the country you are connecting from and grants access accordingly.

Oxford University Press offers developing countries free (or greatly reduced rate) access to many of our journals via our Developing Countries Online Collection offer. The offer via the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) for established not-for profit educational institutes from qualifying countries and provides access to an Online Collection of journals.

GDN has linked policy research institutes from 11 regions and more than 100 countries. GDN offers a range of journals services to address the difficulty faced by many researchers in the global south in accessing journal articles to support their research.

TEEAL is a full-text and bibliographic CD-ROM library of more than 140 of the world's most important scientific journals in the field of agriculture. It is available well below cost to more than 100 of the lowest-income food-deficit countries.

Romeo lists the status of publisher copyright policies and author-archiving policies of academic journals, indicating, by a color scheme, which publishers allow authors to archive preprints and/or post-prints. Journals are classified by color as green, blue, yellow, and white levels. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?all=yes

OpenDOAR lists the wide variety of institutional and subject-based Open Access research archives and repositories which have grown up around the world.

2. OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?c=oaister;page=simple

OAIster is a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented full-text resources searchable without restriction. OAIster includes over 7 million records from over 600 institutions worldwide.

Arc is an experimental research service of Digital Library Research group at Old Dominion University. ARC searches across over 178 international repositories (listed here: http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/oai/admin.jsp) through a unified search interface.

ePrints-UK aims to provide national, discipline-focused searching for access of journal articles, technical reports and web pages in electronic institutional archives of 30 selected

universities and colleges.

BASE is the multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources at Bielefeld University. BASE complements the current metasearch system for catalogues and databases of the Bielefeld Digital Library by allowing searches to be limited by type of document, including scholarly full text archives, digital repositories and preprint servers available on the World Wide Web.

The repository provides full text access to publications, articles and meeting documents produced by the FAO.

Provides access to abstracts and full text documents from USAID, including: Reports, development project documents, and citations of documents held by USAID Information Centers.

Provides access to all publicly available World Bank operational documents (project documents, analytical and advisory work, and evaluations), formal and information research papers, and most World Bank publications. Includes over 15,000 full text documents.

Promotes knowledge sharing by providing access to fulltext documents across a wide range of development topics. Also includes 38 Country Gateway Portals serving local development information needs.

5. Eldis Gateway to Development Information / Inst of Dev Studies http://www.eldis.org

Over 16,000 full text, abstracted development-oriented documents are available from Eldis. Documents are of "strategic, policy or practical interest" for development practitioners based in both the North and the South.

Includes descriptions of over 2,150 award-winning solutions to common social, economic and environmental problems in over 140 developing and developed countries. Searchable by country, scale (global, national, regional, village, etc.) and by subject category. Best Practices is a joint product of UN-HABITAT and The Together Foundation and is supported in part by the Dubai Municipality, the Best Practices Partners, and the Government of UK. Coverage: 1996 – present.

Search thru projects, project documents, and analytical-and-advisory work of the World Bank. An advance search feature is available. The database is also browsable by: Region, country/area, theme or sector.

World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank's annual compilation of data about development. The 2005 WDI includes more than 800 indicators in 83 tables organized in 6 sections: World View, People, Environment, Economy, States and Markets, and Global Links. Data are shown for 152 economies with populations of more than 1 million and 14 country groups, plus selected indicators for 56 other smaller economies. Limited access to statistical database. Full access available via subscription only.

Multilingual statistical databases containing over 1 million time-series records covering international statistics in the areas of production, trade, food balance sheets, fertilizer and pesticides, land use and irrigation, forest products, fishery products, population, agricultural machinery, and food aid shipments.

Contains yearly statistics of employment, unemployment, hours of work, wages, labor cost, consumer price Indices, occupational injuries, strikes and lockouts on over 200 countries (data since 1969); monthly statistics of employment, unemployment, hours of work, wages, consumer price indices (data since 1976); and economically active population estimates and projections, 1950-2010.

Contains data on Official Development Assistance (ODA), Official Aid (OA) and other lending to developing countries and countries in transition as collected by members of the Development Assistance Committee, the World Bank, and the regional financial institutions. The system is sponsored jointly by the OECD and the World Bank and operated by the OECD.

DAC measures the flows of aid and other financial resources to aid recipients. Collected annually from the Members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee, these statistics are broken down by major category of expenditure: capital projects, budget and balance of payments support, food and other commodity aid, technical cooperation and emergency relief.

Includes current monthly economic statistics for most countries and areas of the world. The statistics are obtained by from official sources in the various countries, except where otherwise stated in the notes to the tables. Updated monthly.

Draws selectively on statistics from throughout the UN system, covering all countries, areas and over 300 series from more than 30 specialized international data sources. Time series data is generally available from 1970 or 1980. Many series are disaggregated to show underlying distributions. The source includes comprehensive footnotes and meta-information on sources, definitions, and frequency of updates, and provides technical definitions and standards verbatim from their original sources. Users may view data, compile graphs, calculate derived measures, and export data.

This site lists databases providing full text access to online journals, mostly by subscription. Other services, such as citation searching, email alerts on new journals, abstracts and table of contents alerts are usually freely available.

The Jolis Library Catalog is the catalog of the IMF/World Bank Library Network. The catalog, which contains over 1 million items includes references to a wide variety of development related materials from hundreds of different publishers. The catalog also includes references, and links to many published IMF and World Bank materials.

Global Jolis is the library catalog for World Bank Country Office PIC (Public Information Center)/Libraries. It includes materials in most country offices around the world. The catalog includes references to books, journal articles, working papers, conference proceedings, technical reports, electronic resources, and country-specific reports from local government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, special collections of local language and indigenous knowledge materials.

4. ERIC / US Department of Education [English, French, Spanish] http://www.eric.ed.gov

ERIC includes references to journal articles and non-journal material covering all aspects of education. The database contains over 1.1 million citations from 1966 to the present. More than 107,000 full-text non-journal documents (issued 1993-2004) are available. For technical issues contact: library@ed.gov

FAOBIB is a multilingual, on-line catalogue of documents and publications produced by FAO since 1945, books added to the library collections since 1976, and serials held in the FAO library. Full text links are now provided for all documents which are available in electronic format.

A comprehensive source of bibliographic citations covering

U.S.

agricultural and life sciences information, Agricola contains Over 3,500,000 citations to journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, software, audio-visual materials, and technical reports related to all aspects of agriculture. Coverage is from 1970 to the present, with monthly updates. Some citations in French.

UNESBIB includes over 100,000 citations for books, articles and UNESCO publications, some with full text links. Languages included are: English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Russian.

REDUC es un sistema cooperative de recopilacion, procesamiento y diseminacion de documentos relevantes en el campo de la educación en la region de America Latin y el Caribe. [Cooperative education database covering Latin America and the Caribbean at the regional and national level]

PubMed provides access to over 11 million citations from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and other related databases. Links to selected online journals, some freely available, are also included. Updated monthly. Covers 1960s to present. Some citations are in French, Portuguese, or Spanish.

Popline is the world's largest bibliographic database on population, family planning, and related health. Citations also cover sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, law, and policy issues. The database includes abstracts of journal articles, monographs, technical reports, and unpublished works. Updated twice per month. Some citations in French, Spanish or Portuguese.

A collection of over 1,000 journal title citations with links to the full text by subscription only. ScienceDirect focuses predominantly on science, technology, and medicine, but mathematics, economics and other disciplines are represented. Some citations in French.

Catalogue of United Nations(UN) documents and publications indexed by the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Library of the UN Office at Geneva. Also included are commercial publications and other non-UN sources held in the collection of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library. The coverage of UNBISnet is from 1979 onward, however, older documents are being added to the catalogue on a regular basis as a result of retrospective conversion. UNBISnet also provides instant access to a growing number of full text resources in the six official languages of the UN (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish), including resolutions adopted by the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council from 1946 onward.

Google Scholar facilitates citation searching of scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from a broad range of research areas.

3. Scholarly Journal Document Delivery Support Services for Developing Countries

A. electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS) Programme http://www.ejds.org

The electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS) Programme is geared to facilitate free access to current scientific literature. The goal is to distribute individual scientific articles via email to scientists in institutions in Third World countries that do not have access to sufficient bandwidth to download material from the Internet in a timely manner and/or cannot afford the connection.

AJOL offers a free document delivery service for developing countries. There is a document delivery fee for requestors outside of developing countries.

C. Electronic Supply of Academic Publications to and from universities in developing regions' (ESAP) http://www.fiuc.org/iaup/esap A project of the International Association of University Presidents (IAUP) in cooperation with the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU), SAP aims to set up a sustainable electronic document delivery systems for scholarly publications between universities in the North and the South as well as on a South-South basis, and thus assist in the supply of academic publications to as well as from the developing world.

http://www.gdnet.org/online_services/journals/gdn_journal_services/document_delivery/index.html Accessing the latest development knowledge is a key challenge for many researchers in developing and transition countries. Recognising these challenges, the Global Development Network and the British Library of Development Studies (BLDS) have teamed up to bring GDN/BLDS Document Delivery service to meet the information needs of research institutes in the South.

E. International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications(INASP)/Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) http://www.inasp.info/peri

This network provides access to scientific and scholarly information through electronic means. It includes more than 10,700 full-text online journals, current awareness databases, and document delivery of major scientific, technical, medical, social science, and humanities materials from a wide range of sources. For more information contact inasp@inasp.info.

Free for all is an international collaboration of libraries whose mission is to provide underserved nations with health science journal articles for free.

MIT OCW is a large-scale, web-based electronic publishing initiative whose goals are to: Provide free, searchable access to MIT’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world, and extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the “opencourseware” concept.

As of February 2006, content for eight courses was available online freely thru the Sofia open content initiative. The Sofia project is an open content initiative launched by the Foothill – De Anza Community College District with external funding support.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project provides access to content of the School’s most popular courses. Includes undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.

Tufts open courseware includes course content in: life sciences, with a multidisciplinary approach, an international perspective, and an underlying ethic of service.

USU OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout Utah and around the world. OCW supports USU’s mission to serve the public through learning, discovery, and engagement.

A collection of “cognitively informed,” openly available and free online courses and course materials that enact instruction for an entire course in an online format.

The Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK) is a partnership-based e-learning initiative to train individuals and support institutions and networks world-wide in the effective management of agricultural information. IMARK consists of a suite of distance learning resources, tools and communities on information management. IMARK is being spearheaded by FAO in collaboration with over 30 partner and contributing organizations.