October 25-31 is Open Access Week! This year’s theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.”
Below, we’ve included some Open Access resources at Scholars Portal.
Scholars Portal Journals
We have over three million Open Access articles on Scholars Portal Journals! These articles have been published in Open Access or hybrid journals. We receive Open Access articles from scholarly and commercial publishers, and we also archive some journals hosted by Canadian university libraries.
OA articles on Scholars Portal Journals are identified by a green “Open Access” badge.
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
Users can limit their search results to OA content only by checking the “Open Access Articles” button when searching.
Additionally, we’ve integrated Unpaywall access into the Journals site. Unpaywall harvests from over 50,000 publisher websites, repositories, and more, to find Open Access versions of scholarly articles. Note that the Unpaywall version of an article may not be the version of record–it may be a pre- or post-print version archived by the author.
If you’re searching Scholars Portal Journals and you land on an article that you’re not entitled to, but that can be found in the Unpaywall database, you’ll see a button to take you directly to the Open Access, Unpaywall version.
Visit https://journals.scholarsportal.info/ to try these features.
Scholars Portal Books
Increasingly, we’re seeing the publication of Open Access monographs, especially by university presses supported by university libraries.
From off-campus, if you limit your search to “Books I can read because my library owns them”, you’ll see only Open Access and other free-to-read titles. This includes OA monographs from the University of Ottawa Press, University of Toronto Press, and other university presses, as well as government documents and public domain materials.
Some of the University of Toronto Press titles were made Open Access through a partnership with the University of Toronto Libraries. This partnership funds the publication of scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences, written by University of Toronto faculty members.
We also have several free-to-read collections, including collections of government documents that we acquired in partnership with government departments, and historical documents and monographs digitized by Internet Archive Canada.
The Azrieli Foundation Holocaust Survivor Memoirs is a new collection of memoirs from Canadian survivors of the Holocaust, available for free to Canadian universities. Contact Scholars Portal Books to enable access to this collection.
Visit books.scholarsportal.info to view these titles.
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, including the topographic maps of Ontario and the declassified Second World War maps.
Open geospatial datasets are identified with an orange OA symbol.
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.
Open datasets are also available on Dataverse.
To learn more and start exploring, visit https://odesi.ca/ or https://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/