Open Access, according to the Budapest Open Access Initiative is: "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
Open Access journals make articles freely available online, permitting users to read, redistribute or reuse content. Often the reuse rights are defined through use of Creative Commons Licenses.
The following quality indicators are intended to provide guidance in evaluating publication venues or in responding to invitations to serve as an editor or reviewer. No single criterion below indicates whether or not a publication is reputable, but the balance of positive and negative indicators may inform the evaluation.
This is a list of some of the more popular Open Access Journals in medicine.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): A searchable directory of journals from multiple disciplines that are open access
Public Library of Science (PLoS): PLos publishes several well known and respected open access, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of disciplines in the sciences.
BioMed Central: BioMed Central Ltd., an independent publisher in London, England, provides free access to biomedical research publications. These publications include biology and medicine journal articles, current reports, and meeting abstracts. BioMed Central offers information about current controlled trials, as well as topics in modern biology.
PeerJ: An off-shoot of PLoS, PeerJ is a new open access journal in the biological and medical sciences. PeerJ operates under a unique publishing fee model, which includes lifetime membership options.
Elsevier OA Journals: Open access journals published by Elsevier
SpringerOpen: Open access journals published by Springer
Taylor & Francis OA Journals: Open access journals published by Taylor and Francis.
Wiley Open Access Journals: Open access journals published by Wiley
SlideShare – Users can upload presentations in: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument. The number of downloads of your slides can be tracked and used as an alternative measure of research impact.
Speaker Deck – Another option for uploading presentation slides.
ScienceOpen – Submitted research posters receive a DOI, easy to download and share.
Vimeo – Video sharing website where you can upload a conference presentation (if allowed by the conference) or related videos.
WordPress – Blogging software. Users can set up their own blog and post content online. Researchers can write about their peer-reviewed work.
Green OA: Work deposited into an archive. This could be preprint or post print depending on the publishers terms (ie PubMed Central).
Gold OA: Publishing a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal with open access, sometimes financed through article publication charges.
Hybrid: An option now offered by many traditional publishers where an author can pay a publication fee to make an article open access.
arXiv.org -- Open access to over one million academic articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories. This directory provides a searchable database of academic open access repositories. Here you can search either for repositories or for repository content.
Open Science – Directory which provides access to over 13000 scientific journals, indexed from DOAJ, eJDS, BioMed Central, HighWire Press and others.
PubMedCentral – Free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)
Re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories) – a global registry of research data repositories.
Figshare – Provides free, unlimited public space to upload files in any format to be visualized in a browser. Share such research products as figures, datasets, posters and presentations.
Dryad – A fee-based data sharing initiative that works with publishers to host research data.
URRR – the UR Research Repository offers a place for UR faculty, researchers, students, and staff to deposit their research outputs for sharing publicly with the global community.