By Erin Tigro
Foundations of the Directory of Open Access Journals
This innovative directory was initially conceived in 2002 at the First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in Lund, Copenhagen. In 2009, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition of Europe awarded the Directory an award for its triumphs in scholarly communications. Today, the Directory of Open Access Journals links to more than 6,500 scholarly periodicals, which are maintained by Lund University in Sweden. Through this expansive site, students and professionals all around the world can access archived, current and complete texts of invaluable articles and research papers.
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Open Access on the Directory
The Directory follows the example set by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which allows users to access works gratis and without the contributor's permission. While all information associated with the Directory of Open Access Journals is free to download, link to and reproduce, individual contributors may have particular demands when it comes to what modifications can be made or to what extent their information can be utilized. For this reason, authors and publishers are encouraged to obtain Creative Commons licenses for their works. These specialty licenses work alongside traditional copyrights and allow creators to stipulate to what extent their works can be used and replicated.
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Accessing Content
The Directory of Open Access Journals offers resources on wide-ranging subjects, including agriculture, business, economics, education, law, medical specialties, biology, public health, mathematics, computer science and technology engineering. Users have several ways to access content, so searching couldn't be easier.
They can look for periodicals by:
- Browsing through fields and subfields
- Searching groupings of content listed from A-Z
- Typing specific search terms
- Reviewing the latest journal additions
- Within the last seven days
- Within the last 30 days
Article queries can be narrowed by searching for the specific:
- Keyword(s)
- Author
- International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- Article title
- Journal title
About Works Associated with the Site
Since the website is dedicated to intellectual works, many of the contributors are universities, research institutes and academic societies. However, this does not remit the need for a standard of excellence, so all submissions must undergo a quality control check, either through editorial board or peer review. In addition, sources for all content must be reputable and can include specialty non-profits, government entities or educational institutions, and all contributions should have an ISSN. Because the site is global, there are links to journals from over 25 countries in over 15 languages, including popular tongues like English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German, as well as more regionally-centric ones, such as Catalan, Estonian, Romanian and Hungarian.
Read on for information about how to openly access newspapers on the Web.
