Open Access Research

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Open Research

In these days of budget cuts, free, open access to academic research is more important than ever. Cable Green put up a link to a video that I want to share here as well along with some resources and tips for accessing open research. College of the Redwoods had to cut some journal databases from their library budget. Publishers need to know that this is going to basically backfire on them. Technology is changing the way that we access information and there is no room in education for profiteers! Why aren't we boycotting? The students need to get involved in this: they are paying more and more for education and getting less and less.

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

Open Research Organizations

Right to Research
SPARC

Open Research Journals, Repostories, and Search Tools

• Journals
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals lists more than 2,800 journals that provide free access to the full text of their articles. You can search for a specific journal or browse by subject area.
  • The SPARC Publisher Partner Program features non-profit organizations that are pursuing innovative business models to provide affordable, if not open access, to peer-reviewed research.
• Subject repositories: These archives provide open access to articles by scholars in particular fields. Some only include articles with free, full-text access, while others also include articles with only an abstract. They may also include theses, conference presentations, working papers, or other types of scholarly content. This is a sample list.
  • openDOAR: an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents. http://www.opendoar.org/
  • arXiv: Physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics.http://arxiv.org/
  • CogPrints: Cognitive sciences, especially psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics.http://cogprints.org/
  • ERIC (Education Resources Information Center): Education. http://www.eric.ed.gov/
  • PubMed Central: Biomedical and life sciences. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
  • SSRN (Social Science Research Network): Social sciences, especially law, political science, economics, and business. http://www.ssrn.com/
• Search tools
  • OAIster is a tool to search archives compliant with the Open Archives Initiative metadata standard. This can include open-access journals, institutional and subject repositories, as well as other digital archives, which may include educational or historical content in addition to scholarly journal articles.http://www.oaister.org/
  • The Directory of Open Access Journals also includes a tool to search the content of some journals listed. http://www.doaj.org/

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Open Course Library Project

This great interview with Cable Green on OERs and the Open Course Library Project was on CreativeCommons.org. It was on their front page for a while and I wanted to post it here to keep it out a little longer because it makes some important points about open education resources and open texts. Washington From what I know of the grant (I used to work in WA and my wife, Jacqui Cain, is working on the online dev ed module), the developers of these open resources are not only authoring the modules but they have to teach with them as well. This is a very important part of the peer review process that is missing from even commercial textbooks. The real acid test of a textbook is not the credentials of the author, but whether or not it works in a real-life classroom setting: not all textbooks do. Sometimes it is just a matter of the author's teaching style (if, in fact, your author is a real teacher and not just an ivy league name with a bunch of TA's who do the teaching). In that case, one of the real values, as a teacher, in open texts and open education resources in general is that you are able to adapt the materials to your use and for the use of your students. You never have to ask students to pay for materials, chapters, and lessons that they are not going to use.

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