October 2017: Finding Open Access Content

In honour of International Open Access Week, which this year is October 23-29, this month’s featured topic is how to find Open Access (OA) content on Scholars Portal services.

Scholars Portal Journals

OA articles on Scholars Portal Journals are identified by a green “Open Access” badge.

Screenshot of an Open Access article on Scholars Portal Journals, featuring a green "Open Access" label next to the PDF Download button.

Users can browse through fully OA titles by clicking the “Browse” button from the homepage or by going straight to the Open Access page: https://journals.scholarsportal.info/openAccess

Screenshot of the browse page on SP Journals. The options are: Find by Title, FInd by Subject, and Open Access.

Users can limit their search results to OA content only by checking the “Open Access Articles” button when searching.

Screenshot of the search function on Scholars Portal Journals. The option to limit search to Open Access Articles is highlighted by a red arrow.

Visit https://journals.scholarsportal.info/ to try these features.

Scholars Portal Books

You can limit your search on Scholars Portal Books to specific collections.

Searching “Public Collections Only” will include results from all the open content on the platform, including government documents and titles in the public domain.

Screenshot of the search interface at Scholars Portal Books, with the Collection set to "Public Collections Only".

Limiting to “Open Access” will search just the collection of Open Access books from university presses.

Screenshot of a search on Scholars Portal Books, with the collection set to Open Access.

Visit https://books.scholarsportal.info to learn more.

Open Data Collections

Although Scholars Potal’s data services — the Scholars GeoPortal, odesi, and Dataverse — don’t have the ability to limit searches to open content, they do contain collections of open datasets.

When accessing the GeoPortal outside of a subscribing university, the collections that appear in the “browse” section are automatically limited to open collections. Specifically, most historical collections are open. Open geospatial datasets are identified with an orange OA symbol.

view of datasets on the GeoPortal marked with the orange "lock" symbol of Open Access.

Visit geo.scholarsportal.info to view these maps.

Metadata for datasets in odesi is open and anyone is able to search.  For many collections, downloads are limited to subscribing institutions.  However, some collections, including the majority of the public opinion polls, are entirely open.

Screenshot of odesi search, with the collection "Public Opinion Polls" checked.

Open datasets are also available on the Scholars Portal Dataverse.

To learn more and start exploring, visit https://odesi.ca/ or https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/