I am a psychology researcher working in a renowned university. However, I am not that familiar with open access journals.
Thanks for contacting us regarding your query. The open access model has garnered support from scientific communities over the years. OA allows members of the public to access the content without permission and paywall barriers. OA journals make it easier for scientists to share their data with a wide audience. Most scientists doing research in public institutions use government research grants. These public institutions also pay journal subscription fees to allow their staff and students to read these journals. This means that public funds help in supporting and accessing research. This is one of the reasons that governments and funding agencies support OA journals.
You can use following platforms to find OA journals with respect to your subject:
- DOAJ: You can find a list of open access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The DOAJ also makes it possible for you to access content in OA journals.
- ROAD: You can also use ROAD (Director of Open Access Scholarly Resources). ROAD identifies open access resources which have been given ISSN numbers. The corresponding ISSN records are updated. ISSN records are matched with coverage lists provided by indexing databases, registries, and journal indicators. This process creates bibliographic records of open access content.
- SciELO: The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) is another option. It is a digital library of open access journals. SciELO is used for electronic publishing in developing countries. It was launched in Brazil in 1997. It hosts more than 1,161 OA journals and more than 500,000 open access articles.
- Ulrich’s Knowledgebase: It has information on more than 300,000 periodicals. This list includes OA journals. Ulrich’s can be searched which makes discovery of open access journals easy. The database also includes links to full-text and other content.
- BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is one of the most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources available through open access.
On a related note, we have the Enago Open Access Journal Finder (OAJF) tool which collects data from DOAJ and enlists a number of open access journals. In case you need further help on selecting an open access journal, you should consider accessing the DOAJ portal for specific details.
To avail professional help to select an appropriate target journal for your manuscript, you can take the help of Enago’s Journal Selection service wherein we have experts suggesting you with the top 3-5 journals best suited to your manuscript and preferences once you send us the criteria.
