Happy Open Access Week!
Gleeson’s Electronic Resources & Systems (ERS) department is celebrating by inviting a look at Open Access databases featured on our Databases page.
The majority of our databases are paid for, often at high cost, and due to our license agreements with vendors, are only available to current members of the USF community (students, faculty, and staff).
Open Access databases, on the other hand, are available to all free of charge from anywhere in the world at any time. As a library we fundamentally believe in and fully support Open Access resources.
Open Access databases are easily sortable from our subscription-based databases by selecting Open Access in the “Database Types” drop-down menu.
These high value Open Access databases range from the historical:
Index of Medieval Art – A wide range of images and descriptive data covering works of art produced from late Antiquity up into the sixteenth century. Subjects from the secular to Christian, Jewish, and Islamic culture are represented.
Independent Voices – An impressive assortment of small press magazines from the 1960s up into the near present drawn from special collection holdings from several libraries. From queer poetics to Black Power and beyond topics covered represent an eclectic mix; chock full of ongoing cultural relevance.
To the scientific:
arXiv.org – Hosted by Cornell University, holdings consist of 2.4 million scholarly articles spanning physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
CiteSeerX – Pre-print articles and online papers in the sciences, particularly computer science. Also, the site is a citation index showing who has cited whom.
And further afield:
SciELO – Full text articles from over 1,200 Latin American journals on a wide range of subjects (not just science!). While most articles are in Spanish or Portuguese, there is also some English language content.
OAPEN Library – Includes over 15,000 books and chapters in 55 different languages, predominantly in the areas of humanities and social sciences. For more information on this resource, see our previous blog post about OAPEN.
Of course, a definitive Open Access database in our collection is USF’s own Scholarship Repository!
This is the quintessential gathering of scholarship from across the USF community and beyond, all fully searchable and accessible to anyone. Links to scholarship in the Repository show up in browser search engines such as Google, widening the potential for its ultimate reach in terms of readership. This ensures a wide distribution of the USF community’s original scholarship.
On the landing page there are links to the top ten downloads of all time along with the 20 most recent additions.
Moving further down there’s a map which slowly populates showing locations of recent downloads in the last 30 days. This regularly numbers in the tens of thousands every month, so be aware it will take a while for the map to fully populate.
There is also an option to browse all the available collections.
Along with presenting research from across the vast range of USF’s academic departments and programs there’s work from folks outside the USF community, such as the Black Educology Mixtape “Journal”.
In addition, there are other “fun” features, like the READ posters of USF faculty authors posing with their books.
All of these posters, now numbering in the dozens, hang throughout Gleeson. Come roam the library and check them out! See if you are able to locate every one of them!