In this guide, we are gathering links to Open Science resources for biological topics.
If you decide to reuse any of the material and information linked through this guide, please make sure to follow the licence under which the material has been released. If you have suggestions for additions to this list please email: library-sande@qmul.ac.uk.
Open Science is a movement within Academia and beyond, which is trying to democratise publically funded science and make it available to the people who has funded it. These principles have applications in all aspects of the production of new scientific knowledge.
There are many excellent resources, which explores open science. For example:
What is Open Science? Introduction: A good introduction to Open Science from Foster, which is a European Union funded project.
Open Science Training Handbook: A freely available comprehensive handbook to Open Science.
Open Access is shortening of the concept "open access publishing", and is one of the pillars that make open science possible.
Open Access: Information from the QMUL Research and Repository Library team which can answer your questions about Open Access.
Queen Mary Research Online: QMUL’s institutional repository where you can get open access to QMUL research.
Core: Searches open access resources from 3,669 different repositories worldwide.
Base - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: Searches a curated index of open access and deep web resources. 60% of the collected resources is accessible as open access. The advanced search allows the user to refine search results, and it is also possible to browse.
EBSCO Essentials: Searches open access resources in various formats, also open access e-books.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): Search over 10,000 academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from 243 publishers.
OpenDOAR: OpenDOAR is a portal which links up to Open Access repositories from all over the world.
Open Library: An initiative which gives you access to full-text resources (free after you sign up) which also include science related subjects.
Selected Internet Resources -- Government Resources for Science Images and Video: The Library of Congress lists many American Open Access image banks.
Trove: Gateway to online Australian resources: images, texts, videos and more. Hosted by the National Library of Australia. Including digitised Australian newspapers.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): The Directory of Open Access Journals makes it possible to browse journals by subject. It is also possible to search within the different titles for articles of a specific topic.
eLife: Founded in 2011 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, this journal publishes research covering the life and biomedical sciences.
Nucleic Acids Research: This journal publishes the results of research into physical, chemical, biochemical and biological aspects of nucleic acids and proteins involved in nucleic acid metabolism and/or interactions.
Open Biology: Published by The Royal Society.
PeerJ: Has two peer-reviewed publications: PeerJ covering the Biological, Medical and Environmental Sciences, and PeerJ Computer Science. You can switch between the two on the journal homepage, underneath the search bar.
PLOS: PLOS (Public Library of Science) publishes a range of open access journals within Science and Medicine.
Wiley Open Access Journals: Publishes peer reviewed open access journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.
Pre-published articles and other written texts from various online user self-published online archives and collections is another source to open access material. Lots of these articles do get published eventually, but the version shared may be substantially different from the published articles.
There are also services, which are based around browser extensions. They can be useful discovering and accessing resources. For example:
Endnote Click: Browser extension which tries to make it easier for the user to search and download documents within their library's subscription, when not available, it tries to source it through Open access.
Open Access Button: Browser extension which enable users to search and download Open access articles.
Unpaywall: Browser extension, which enable the user to search and download Open access articles.
Open Data is data which is freely available and allowed to be reused and shared.
Open Data from many universities is made available through the individual repositories, this is also the case at Queen Mary, while other universities, govermental agencies and individual researchers/research teams do it in other ways.
EU Open Data Portal: Contains data which from the European Union's committees, agencies and bodies.
Figshare: Provides researchers with a platform to publish, share and discover research data from various fields in a citable and shareable manner.
Find open data: A UK governmental portal which releases open data produced by governmental bodies.
Global Open Data Index: Useful global overview what open data you should be able to access from various countries.
Harvard Dataverse: Open data repository hosted by University of Harvard.
Mendeley Data: The reference management tool Mendeley has a free repository of open data where many universities and other institutions make their data available.
PANGAEA: Concetrating on data for earth & environmental science.
Zenodo: Developed under the European OpenAire programme, led by CERN.
Open Science also have impact on software, and some software are created to be shared and support research.
Open Science Project: Links to various open science software divided by subject.