Open Educational Resources (OER)

What are Open Journals?

What are open journals?

Most publishers own the rights to the articles in their journals. Anyone who wants to read the articles must pay to access them. Anyone who wants to use the articles in any way must obtain permission from the publisher and is often required to pay an additional fee.

Although many researchers can access the journals they need via their institution and think that access is free, in reality it is not. The institution has often been involved in lengthy negotiations around the price of their site license and reuse of this content is limited.

Open Access journals today vary widely across a spectrum based on the core components of reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights and more. The highest possible level of Open Access means that articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere, to be downloaded, printed, distributed, read, reused and remixed (including commercially) without restriction, as long as the author and the original source are properly attributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

--Adapted from PLOS Open Access

Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals
The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be the one-stop shop for users of open access journals.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a leading full-text scientific database offering journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 20,000 books.
OMICS Group
OMICS International, through its Open Access Initiative, is committed to make genuine and reliable contributions to the scientific community. OMICS Group hosts over 300 leading-edge peer reviewed Open Access Journals and organizes over 100 International Conferences annually all over the world.
Oxford Open Journals
Oxford University Press (OUP) is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. They embrace open access (OA) publishing to support this mission.
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit organization to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. They strive to bring scientists together and to share their work as rapidly and as widely as possible, to advance science and to benefit society as a whole.
SpringerOpen
SpringerOpen includes peer-reviewed, fully open access journals across all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences.

What about predatory OA publishers?

Predatory Open Access Journals "exist for the sole purpose of profit, not the dissemination of high-quality research findings and furtherance of knowledge. These predators generate profits by charging author fees, also known as article processing charges (APCs), that far exceed the cost of running their low-quality, fly-by-night operations.

Charging a fee is not itself a marker of a predatory publisher: many reputable OA journals use APCs to cover costs, especially in fields where research is often funded by grants. (Many subscription-based journals also charge authors fees, sometimes per page or illustration.) However, predatory journals are primarily fee-collecting operations—they exist for that purpose and only incidentally publish articles, generally without rigorous peer review, despite claims to the contrary."

--College & Research Libraries News

DOAJ is considered a Open Access Journal whitelist, listing journals it has vetted and found to be of good quality, while Beall's List lists OA journals it deems "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers."