Open Access is a model for scholarly communication which promotes free, immediate, unrestricted online availability of research articles. By removing price barriers and reducing permission barriers, Open Access helps to accelerate research, encourage innovation, enrich education, and improve the public good.
A definitive overview of Open Access by Peter Suber can be found at http://bit.ly/oa-overview
Open Access journal content is distributed at no cost and therefore other means of funding the publication process are used. Often, an article processing charge (APC) is assessed to authors. This fee is determined by the journal/publisher and may be paid by the author, the author’s institution, the researcher’s funding agency or some other funding source.
Charging fees to publish articles as open access is a model used by many reputable journal publishers and is not the only factor used to determine if a journal should be considered "predatory." Be wary of excessive fees or lack of transparency.
See Article Processing Charges (APCs) for a good overview of this component of Open Access publishing.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) - online search tool for academic web resources and documents. BASE harvests from repositories and Deep Web servers demonstrating academic quality and relevance.
Digital Commons Network - Research tool for free access to full-text scholarly articles and other research from the repositories of hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - comprehensive list of high quality, peer reviewed Open Access research journals.
OAIster - a union catalog of millions of records that represent open access resources
OpenDOAR - an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
SHERPA-ROMEO - searchable database of publisher's policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in Open Access repositories.
DISCIPLINE REPOSITORIES - list of OA disciplinary repositories (also called central or subject repositories). Unless otherwise noted, they accept relevant deposits regardless of the author's institutional affiliation