Website of the month for October - Directory of Open Access Journals

For this month's HEDS Website of the Month it seemed quite fitting to go with an Open Access site given it is Open Access Week. 

https://doaj.org/

The DOAJ website says:
"The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

DOAJ is a membership organisation and membership is available in 3 main categories: Publisher, Ordinary Member and Sponsor. A DOAJ Membership is a clear statement of intent and proves a commitment to quality, peer-reviewed open access. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Principles) and DOAJ members are expected to follow these principles as a condition of membership. DOAJ reserves the right to reject applications for membership, or revoke membership if a member or sponsor is found to contravene the Principles. Read more about membership here.

DOAJ is a community-curated list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. To assist libraries and indexers keep their lists up-to-date, we make public a list of journals that have been accepted into or removed from DOAJ but we will not discuss specific details of an application with anyone apart from the applicant. Neither will we discuss individual publishers or applications with members of the public unless we believe that, by doing so, we will be making a positive contribution to the open access community.

DOAJ's Mission

DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone."

Website of the Month - Open Access Button

Open Access Button is exactly that, it is a button you click through your browser to find legal Open Access versions of research publications that may otherwise sit behind a paywall. It is a way of opening up research to global audiences that can have a positive effect on the world, especially when we think about health research. 

Open Access Button

The website says:

"We urgently need trusted knowledge that’s fairly owned, created, and read. We’re addressing that by creating a family of library-aligned, open source tools built not-for-profit, but for-change. Our tools make it simpler to do research without subscriptions.

The project started when students got tired of hitting paywalls. Instead of accepting their frustration, they became inspired and took an idea to track the impact of paywalls to a hackday. The Open Access Button was launched in November 2013."

Open Access Button

ScHARR Library Information Officer Sheldon Korpet said about the tool. 

"Open Access Button is a website which searches aggregate research repositories (like core.ac.uk) for journal articles that are free and legal to read. Simply paste the URL of the article you can't access and search to see if OA Button can find an open access version to read instantly. If the article isn't available OA Button ask the author to put a copy in a repository, so the tool only gets better with more users and searches." - Sheldon, Information Officer, ScHARR Library