What is Open Access?
From the Canadian Association of Research Libraries:
"Open access is a model of scholarly communication that promises to greatly improve the accessibility of results of research. In general terms, scholarly research that is published in open access is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (although it does require that proper attribution of works be given to authors)."
Learn more about Open Access on our Research and Publishing Support page.
Open Access eBook Collections
Many eBooks are available through library subscription or purchase and are findable in OMNI. However, the items listed below offer collections of freely available online books, many of which are not available in OMNI.
- Internet Archive. Over 20 million books and texts as well as archived webpages, audio recordings, live concerts, videos, images and software programs.
- Project Gutenberg: Offers over 61 000 books across a range of subjects online.
- Open Library: Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.
- Open Textbooks: York Libraries' guide to teaching, learning, and research resources that are created with the intention of being freely available to users anywhere in the world.
- eCampus Ontario Open Library: A collection of open textbooks and other open resources. This curated collection aligns with top subject areas in post-secondary education and features reviews from experts and educators across Canada.
- Directory of Open Access Books: DOAB indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books
- Open Book Publishers: Has published more than 217 rigorously peer-reviewed Open Access monographs, expanding from a focus on the humanities and social sciences.
- Punctum Books: Recognized for publishing high-quality open-access books in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, and Architecture & Design.
Open Access Journals
York Libraries subscribes to many e-journals which you will find as you search OMNI, including open access journals indexed in the widely used Directory of Open Access Journals. The following are links to some freely available scholarly journals which may not be easily found through OMNI.
- OpenAire: a European project supporting Open Science. It contains many publications, as well as research data, software, and other research outputs.
- York Digital Journals: Over 40 York-affiliated journals hosted by York University Libraries across a range of disciplines. (Most but not all journals are open access in this collection.)
- Directory of Open Access Journals: DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- Open Library of the Humanities: publishes open access academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, and hosts its own multidisciplinary journal.
York University Open Access Collections
Where possible from a copyright perspective, York University Libraries makes available open access digitized and born digital content from its collections via the following platforms:
- Online Exhibits: These exhibits feature content collected and digitized by the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University.
- York University Digital Library: YUDL is a repository of digital objects (digitized books, photographs, films, videos, sound recordings, websites, posters, etc.) that have either been digitized from York's collections or have been acquired by the Libraries and its research partners.
Open Access Repositories
Open access repositories are a global movement and they number in the thousands. York-affiliated repositories and indexes of global repositories are listed below:
- YorkSpace: YorkSpace is the institutional repository for York University. It collects, preserves, and disseminates the scholarship of the York University community and its partners.
- Registry of Open Access Repositories: ROAR indexes and provides information for over 4700 open access repositories worldwide.
- Scholars Portal Dataverse: SP Dataverse is a data repository hosted by the Ontario Council of University Libraries. York University Libraries is a member, and makes available this repository to York University researchers to deposit and share research data.
- Federated Research Data Repository: FRDR is a Canadian open access data repository which aggregates data published by researchers affiliated with a Canadian institution.
- re3data.org: Is a registry of research data repositories, offering detailed information on more than 2,000 research data repositories worldwide.