University Library

Open Access literature

OA journals

  • journals with immediate open access
  • journals with a time embargo = full texts of articles are only accessible after a certain period of time, usually 6–12 months
  • hybrid model journals = the publisher gives the author a choice whether to make his/her article available in the form of a subscription (free for the author, paid for the reader) or in the form of an APC payment (paid for the author, free for the reader). More information about APC.

Basic features:

  • the full texts of these journals are openly and freely available to all users
  • the standard and quality of OA journals is assured by the peer review process
  • copyright remains with the authors

The list of open access journals is provided by the DOAJ database, the National Library of the Czech Republic and the aggregator Paperity.

Some publishers publish a list of periodicals they publish in OA mode:

Subscription journals that have switched to the OA model.

Digitized journals and newspapers:

UWB OA journals:

Full texts of the articles can be found in the Digital Library.

Czech OA journals

Publishers' open access policies can be found in the SHERPA/ROMEO, ROAR, ROARMAP and OpenDOAR databases. Whether a journal is Plan S compliant can be traced at https://journalcheckertool.org/.

How to start an Open Access journal?

If you want to start a new open access journal, or if your editorial office is thinking about making your journal open access, you can use the Open Journal Systems editorial system. This is an open source software where you can manage and publish electronic journals. With OJS, you can publish full-text articles, effectively present the journal on the web, and facilitate editorial processes. More information about OJS in the presentation.

Do you want your journal to be included in one of the prestigious databases? Find out the conditions for inclusion.

Beware of the so-called predatory journals.

OA books

Some peer-reviewed science books are also published in open access mode. The books go through the classic peer review process.

You can find specialized Open Access books in these directories:

You can find freely available electronic versions of specialized books in these directories:

Popular and educational literature and fiction is included in:

Digitized books from libraries around the world (including the National Library of the Czech Republic) are provided by Google Books and the Guttenberg project.

OA repositories and websites

Electronic collections of scientific and academic papers by authors from a single institution or discipline, freely available via the Internet.

  • institutional repositories
  • disciplinary repositories
  • authors' personal websites
  • author profile within the ResearchGate science network
  • generation of personal pages within the institutional repository
  • a repository for researchers funded by the Gates Foundation Gates Open Research
  • Scopus and Web of Science databases disclose open access information for articles using the orange Open Access (Scopus) and Free Full Text from Publisher (WoS)