This post was written by Matthew Von Hendy, Chair of the Public Policy section of DSOC and an independent information professional at Green Heron Information Services.

Is it possible for a researcher or lay person without much money to get access to high quality peer-reviewed scientific research and information?  Increasingly, the answer is yes!

In celebration of Open Access Week I have created a list of my favorite open access science resources.   Many of these resources provide full-text or links to full-text if available but a few are only bibliographic in nature.

Open access resources are also prone to frequent changes.  One notable recent loss is the Scitopia federated search engine.    Please feel free to add suggestions or make comments on sources you’ve used.

Federated Searches:

• DOE Information Systems – www.scienceaccelerator.gov Federated search covering Department of Energy related research, articles and conference proceedings
• Science Gov – www.science.gov Searches over 50 U.S. Government science-related databases and websites
• Scirus — www.scirus.com Maintained by Elsevier, this federated search covers journals and science related materials from the web
• WorldWideScience.Org — www.worldwidescience.org/about.html Federated search developed by the Department of Energy that covers national and international government science resources

Major Science Publisher Open Access Initiatives

• Wiley Open Access — www.wileyopenaccess.com
• Elsevier Science Direct – www.sciencedirect.com Open access journals are mixed in with subscription titles.
• Springer Open ­– www.springeropen.com/journals

Science Journals

• BioMed Central — www.biomedcentral.com/journals/bysubject Publisher of 220 open access peer-reviewed science, technology and medicine journals.
• Directory of Open Access Journals — www.doaj.org Focus on scientific journals using quality-controlled measures—somewhat spotty but decent international coverage
• HighWire — www.highwire.stanford.edu Publishers of 1700+ peer-reviewed science journals—older content is frequently open access
• Public Library of Science – www.plos.org Advocacy organization and publisher of 7 high quality peer-reviewed open access journals

Subject Specific Resources

• Agricola– www.agricola.nal.usda.gov Agriculture and agriculture-related database from the USDA
• arXiv– www.arxiv.org arXiv provides open access to nearly 800,000 e-prints in the area of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.
• CiteSeer — www.citeseer.ist.psu.edu Digital library and search engine focused on computer and information science.
• Defense Technical Information Center — www.dtic.mil/dtic A searchable repository for all publicly accessible DOD science and technical research.
• Popline — www.popline.org Database covering family planning and reproductive health with excellent international coverage.
• PubChem --  www.pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov The 3 databases in PubChem provide information on the biological activities of small molecules.
• PubMed – www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and on-line books.  Free full text is linked to when available.
• Toxnet — www.toxnet.nlm.nih.gov From the United States National Library of Medicine databases on toxicology, hazardous chemicals, environmental health and toxic releases.
• TRID — www.trid.trb.org Transportation-related research covering 940,000 records of transportation research worldwide.
• UBio — www.ubio.org/index.php?pagename=home Universal Biological Indexer and Organizer uses names and taxonomic intelligence about organisms.

Other Posts for Open Access Week 2012: