Open Access

The open access bug has bit me, and I’m not allergic. Recently, I’ve been thinking about free, fulltext articles that are of comparable quality to content within fee-based aggregators (e.g., Ebsco, Gale/Cengage, etc.). The fruit of my pursuit: I landed on Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). It provides access to more than 4,000 peer-reviewed, quality-controlled journals and more than 300,000 articles. The scope is academic, and includes arts / humanities as well as hard sciences. Take a look at DOAJ’s subject tree. Then conduct a search for fulltext articles here. Another tool that I learn about in my quest: Open J-Gate, which claims to offer access to more than 6,000 journals . . . and more than 1 million articles. Then there’s Open Thesis, a free repository of dissertations, theses, and assorted academic documents. Curious to know more about open access? Take a look at this definition. See also this Wikipedia entry.