I am becoming very excited about all the new Open Access journals and
journal papers on the web but I want to mention something new, Open
Access Books. A good definition of a journal paper is a paper,
describing scientific research results, which has undergone some form of
anonymous peer-review and is published in a regularly appearing serial,
usually by a third party publisher and not by the university of the
author. Open Access means anyone has access to the full text of the
publication on the web, with no limitations except possibly a
requirement to register. Two terms commonly used to describe open
access papers are gold and green. Gold journals that are open access
from the start. Green open access means author's posted copies of their
manuscripts to open access sites on the web.
I have found the practice becoming more popular on individual academics websites.
One of the larger Open Access Publishers OAPEN
(Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a consortium of
European and American university presses based at the National Library
of the Hague . It has run the Directory of Open Access Journals for
several years. There have been some questions by researchers if all of
these are refereed journals, but OAPEN's policy statement says they
screen publishers who wish to join the library. "Publishers or
publishing entities (usually research institutes with their own
publishing program) need to be predominantly academic publishers, which
primarily means they should have transparent procedures for peer review
of manuscripts..." "OAPEN requires publishers to describe their peer
review procedures and make these discriptions available for publication
on the OAPEN website."
On April 13, 2012 OAPEN announced the opening of the Directory of Open Access Books (www.doabooks.org)
a finding service for open access books and monographs in the OAPEN
LIBRARY. The OAPEN LIBRARY is primarily a library of the humanities and
social sciences.
DOAB can search by
>Titles
>ISBN
>Author
>Keywords
>Subjects
>Abstracts
>Publisher
>Year of publication
>Language
