Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. — Suber, 2012
This guide outlines some of the Open Access resources available in the subject area of Chemistry. The guide aims to direct you OA journals, OA publishers, sources for OA data. Open Access falls into two categories:
- Gold OA is published in journals that make their articles freely available online. Some gold OA publishers use an Article Processing Fee which is paid on the author-side.
- Green OA is published in repositories. If the work is published in a traditional subscription-based journal, publishers often grant authors the right to also make their work freely available elsewhere online through Green OA. However, there are sometimes embargo periods that require authors to wait a period of time before publishing in Green OA.
This guide outlines sources for locating both gold OA and green OA. For gold OA, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) provides a comprehensive listing of all of the peer-reviewed OA journals. The OA Publishers page outlines some publishers of OA journals. The Databases page outlines a number of chemistry-specific resources that aggregate data available from gold and green OA sources.
Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ is a directory of OA journals which “aims to be THE one stop shop for users of open access journals.” The DOAJ includes a comprehensive listing of Open Access journals in Chemistry. It aims to cover all OA journals “that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.”
For authors, it provides valuable information about each journal, such as its publisher, if it has publication fees and what they would be, and its OA policy.
For researchers, it provides article level searching. About half of the journals are searchable at the article level.
Search DOAJ: 