In addition to commercial publishers, a number of open access publishers have been established in the last twenty years and the open access movement continues to gather momentum. The page provides a listing of open access resources.
One of the resources listed is the Directory of Open Access Journals. This is the gold standard for open access journals. If you find an open access journal which isn't listed, be careful, as it may be of dubious quality, and you should evaluate its quality by using the CRAAP test or SIFTing. To explain why, we have to talk very briefly about scholarly publishing. This will be a gross simplification, but here goes...
It costs money to create and print scholarly articles: you have to proof the article, format it, have it assessed by other scholars etc. To pay for this and to make money, commercial publishers charge the readers. With open access, some, but not of all the time, the authors pay to make their work freely available. If you're unscrupulous, you can set up a journal and charge authors to publish, but not proof the article or check its quality, which leads to articles like...
This was published in the "Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews". Obviously, this was done as a joke and to prove a point, Publishers who do this are called predatory publishers, and while not the problem is not restricted to open access publishing, predatory publishers do deter some people committing to open access. This is unfortunate because more people will see your articles if they are open access and if they see your articles then they are more likely to use your articles in their work. A librarian-created list of predatory publishers and journals can be found on the Internet. The list is problematic in that it reflects the bias of its creator and should be considered advisory and not authoritative.
The advantages of Open Access include:
Disadvantages:
This is a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access, Journals apply to be included in this directory and have to meet criteria for inclusion (such as not publishing anything like "What's the deal with birds?). Content can be searched or browsed.
As above, but for books instead of journals. Established by the OAPEN Foundation (see below) and OpenEdition, the DOAB is a curated list of open access academic books
BMC, formerly BioMedCentral are one of the pioneers of open access publishing. They specialise in biomedical journals but have recently branched out into engineering and the physical sciences.
Jurn is a search engine for open access content and is particularly strong for the arts and humanities (link updated July 2022)
A catalogue of millions of records of open access resources
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship in the humanities
A multidisciplinary aggregator (a fancy way of saying search engine) of Open Access journals and papers.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
A UNESCO funded directory of Open Access publications, including journals, conferences and annuals, that have all been awarded ISSNs (International Standard Serial Number). Note: searches for publication, not content
