Open Access Publishing

Increasingly scholarly articles are becoming available on an open access basis, often through institutional repositories like our own ARAN or through discipline-based repositories such as arXiv (Physical, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) or SocArXiv (Social Sciences) . The article version on these repositories will usually be the final draft post-refereeing (also known as the post-print), so the only difference to the published version is the absence of the publisher's type-setting, formatting, logos and pagination.  Several tools, services and browser plug-ins have been developed to help you find open access versions of journal articles:

DOAI (Digital Open Access Identifier) is an alternate DOI (Digital Object Identifier) resolver that takes you to a free version of the requested article, when available. To use it, replace dx.doi.org by doai.io in any DOI link. it uses metadata from Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE).

Google Scholar – searching for an article in Google Scholar will link you to both the paywalled version of the article and openly available versions if available.  Please see our guide to configuring Google so that it will recognise you as an NUI Galway registered user and will link you to subscribed content where the library has a subscription.

Kopernio – another browser plugin from Clarivate Analytics that will link you to open access versions of articles as well as library subscriptions.  It is necessary to register (for free) to use this plugin.

Open Access Button - a plugin for Chrome or Firefox that works similarly to Unpaywall – click on the button while you are viewing a pay-walled journal article and it will search for open access versions.  If it doesn’t find one, it will give you the option to have them ask the author to make the article available open access.  You can also search openaccessbutton.org directly for a known article by DOI or Citation.

OpenAIRE EXPLORE - find open access publications, includes 100+ million publications and 1+ million research data objects

Unpaywall  - a browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox, which will display a green icon when you encounter a pay-wall for a journal article if an open access version of the article is available and will link you directly to it.

CONUL (Consortium of National and University Libraries) Guidance on negotiating & signing a contract with a scholarly publisher

arxiv.org open access articles across a range of subjects including Physics, Mathematics. Computer Science

Base Bielefeld provides access to millions of scholarly articles and other materials (e.g. theses) from more than 3,000 sources.

CORE provides access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from over 600 Open Access repositories.

Digital Commons Network portal to free scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide

Direct2AAM a set of guides to help authors find Author Accepted Manuscripts. The guides, available for most major journals, provide easy to follow instructions for authors to obtain an Author Accepted Manuscript from their journal submission system, where the AAM is stored during the publishing process.

DOAJ directory of open access journals

DOAB directory of open access books

Open Access Directory a compendium about open access (OA) maintained by the OA community 

OpenDOAR the directory of open access repositories

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

OAIster

ROAR registry of open access repositories

The FOSTER portal is an e-learning platform that brings together training resources relevant to open access publishing and Open Science.

The Library provides:

• Training on open access publishing and the University of Galway Research Repository
• One-to-one consultations 
• Assistance with uploading your publications to University of Galway Research Repository

For further information, advice and support please contact:

• Trish Finnan, Digital Publishing and Data Management Librarian, Phone: 091-495961, Email: trish.finnan@universityofgalway.ie

Open Scholarship Community at University of Galway

For further information related to open scholarship, open publishing, open tools please contact:

• Open Scholarship Librarian

See also https://library.universityofgalway.ie/research/openscholarship/ and the Open Scholarship Community Galway website at https://osc-international.com/osc-galway/

The following video tutorial provides an introduction to Open Access Publishing, the University of Galway Research Repository and related supports at the University of Galway and complements content in this library guide.

Open Access Publishing Part 1 What is Open Access Publishing ?

Open Access Publishing Part 2 How to submit your publications to University of Galway Research Repository