Scholarly Communications

Here are some tools that will help build a sustainable open access environment while getting you articles at point of need:

• Open Access Button - The Open Access Button is an app that helps researchers, patients, students and the public get legal access to research they need and request research be made available. This product will help you find both open articles and open data. Just download the browser extension and start searching.  This open source tool was funded by Public Library of Science, Jisc, Open Society Foundations, Mozilla Science, and Crowdfunders.
• Unpaywall - This tool searches and finds full-text research papers as you browse. Data is sourced from open access repositories including institutional repositories and preprint servers.  Just download the Chrome or Firefox extension and the tool will do the rest. This open source tool was created by OurResearch (formerly: Impactstory) with grants from the National Science Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
• Lazy Scholar - Created by Nueroscience PhD student Colby Vorland, Lazy Scholar is a tool that searches and finds free scholarly texts, metrics, further reading recommendations, and provides quick citation and sharing links automatically. 

A preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. It allows authors to make their findings immediately and freely available to the community.  Below is a list of preprint repositories:

• arXiv - For physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics. Funded by Cornell University and the Simons Foundation as well as member institutions.
• bioRxiv - For biology. Operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. - eLife journal encourages authors to deposit their preprints in bioRxiv by making the deposit part of the workflow upon submission and removing the need to re-enter submission data into bioRxiv.
• OSF Preprints - A open preprint repository network incorporating agriculture, engineering, psychological sciences, and social sciences. Operated by the Open Science Framework.
  • SocArXiv - For social sciences.
  • engrxiv - For engineering
  • AgriXiv - For agriculture. 
  • PsyArXiv - For psychological sciences.

• Find open access e-books in your discipline in the Directory of Open Access Books.
  • To be included in the DOAB, a publisher must produce books that are open access and meet academic standards.​

Open data set repositories:

• Re3data.org - a global registry of research data repositories. The registry covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. re3data presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions. re3data aims to promote a culture of sharing, increased access, and better visibility of research data.

• The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching and learning applications. The OSP currently has a corpus of over 20 million English-language syllabi from 140 countries. It uses machine learning and other techniques to extract citations, dates, fields, and other metadata from these documents. The resulting data is made freely available via the Syllabus Explorer and in bulk for academic research. Created by the American Assembly—an independent non-profit organization affiliated with Columbia University.

• Creative Commons images - Openverse (formerly: CC Search) is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
• Smithsonian Open Access - Search millions of records of museum objects, archives, and library materials including nearly 5 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts. There is also an advanced search option.

• Open Pedagogy Notebook - resource designed for educators that are interested in learning more about open pedagogy. The resource provides examples that are both classroom-tested practices as well as budding ideas. Contributions to the resource are welcome. 
  • Started by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa