For authors:

Information, arguments and help for Open Access

• SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition - – an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries in America with lots of resources; recently, SPARC Europe has been founded as well
• EOS: Enabling Open Scholarship - a more Europe-oriented initiative that supports and provides an introduction to Open Access and Open Scholarship
• DOAJ: The most complete directory of quality-controlled Open Access journals; offers full text article search for a part of the journals
• SHERPA, a British website, explains in the ROMEO database what is permitted by specific publishers, and in the JULIET database what research funders' policies are
• Das OA-Tracking Project provides continuous, up-to-date information on new developments, which can be subscribed to via a feed/Twitter and other social media

For readers:

Search engines for Open Access documents

Google Scholar is already a well-known search engine for scientific content but it does not give you many options for narrowing down your search. You can carry out more specific and precise searches, for instance by keywords, document types or origin, using the following OA search engines:

• BASE, a search engine provided by Bielefeld University (search covers around 31 million datasets), is currently probably the best search engine for Open Access digital content
• OAIster, a search engine provided by the University of Michigan in collaboration with OCLC-WorldCat

Of interest for specific disciplines:

• JURN - for Open Access content in the humanities and social sciences. Jurn is multilingual and produces very good hits for non-English content as well
• CiteSEERx - for IT and information sciences

Repositories

OpenDOAR provides an overview of the numerous subject-based and institutional repositories available. You can also search by countries/regions. Webometrics also provides direct links via rankings for the individual repositories.

Access to individual institutional repositories in Switzerland:

• E-Doc, Universität Basel (currently only e-theses)
• CDS, CERN
• Archive ouverte, Université de Genève
• Infoscience, EPF Lausanne
• Serval, Université de Lausanne
• RERO DOC - joint repository Repositorium of universities in French-speaking Switzerland (Fribourg, Genève, Lausanne, Neuchâtel)
• Alexandria, Universität St. Gallen
• E-Collection, ETH Zürich
• ZORA, Universität Zürich

Additions to this page are planned. Please send us your wishes and suggestions! (Contact)