Free and Open Access Links: Science General

Information about science specific online resources that are open access so available to all researchers and science specific online resources that are freely available to researchers in developing and emerging countries.

African Journal Archive
The African Journal Archive is a retrospective digitisation project of full-text journal articles published in Africa. Journal articles hosted on the Archive extend back to the first issue (if available) and end with the last pre-current issue (determined by the publisher). The website comprises over 700 issues and 150,000 pages of journal archives of academic, scholarly, institutional, museums, and professional research organizations in Africa. Online access to the archive is free of charge to Africa and the world.

Best of Science
The Best of Science is a free-access scientific publication of preprints and peer-reviewed articles. It is publishing in five major fields split in thousands of special areas: Exact Sciences, Technologies, Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences and Human Sciences. Best of Science authors pay for the publishing process of papers and preprints. Fees are low and especially adapted to respond to the geographical origins of the authors. Papers can be published 1 week after reception. Access to the journal is wholly free.

eJDS - eJournals Delivery Service
The Abdus Salam ICTP/TWAS Donation Programme, in collaboration with the ICTP Scientific Computer Section and ICTP Library, is developing a prototype information retrieval system called eJDS: eJournals Delivery Service. This is geared to facilitate the access to current scientific literature for scientists in institutions in Third World Countries who have low bandwidth internet facilities. Titles are included from Academic Press, the American Physical Society, Institute of Physics Publishing and World Scientific.

Google Directory
Comprehensive trawl of web sites offering free science publications.

Indian Academy of Sciences
The prestigious peer-reviewed journals of the Indian Academy of Sciences are available online free to all users. The first issue of the Academy Proceedings appeared in July 1934. Publications cover the physical sciences, life sciences, physics, mathematics, chemistry, earth and planetary sciences, plant sciences, animal sciences, and modern biology, materials science, astrophysics and astronomy, genetics plus the journal Resonance, aimed at improving the quality of science education and teaching. Access to all of these journals is free and open to all users.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
A non-governmental research organisation conducting inter-disciplinary scientific studies on environmental, economic, technological and social issues in the context of human dimensions of global change, IIASA's charter stipulates that all its research findings should be freely disseminated worldwide. The full-text of the institute's publications can be downloaded from its website at: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/docs/IIASA_Publications.html at no charge. The contents of this catalogue can be browsed by author, date, project, subject or type, or the required publication can be located using a simple keyword search. A free quarterly newsletter, Options, is also available from: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Options/ IIASA is a member of ICSU.

Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology
Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists. It covers the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science. The database currently contains 34916 records.

National Academy Press
Over 2,800 reports, e-newsletters and journals from US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.

Open Science Directory
See entry in INASP List of Resources: Multi-Disciplinary

Platinum Metals Review
Quarterly journal of research on the platinum metals and of developments in their application in industry.

Public Library of Science (PLOS)
A non-profit organisation of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. PLoS currently plans to begin publishing two new journals - working titles PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine - publishing the best peer-reviewed original research articles, timely reviews and commentary. PLoS Biology launched its first issue on October 13, 2003, in print and online. PLoS Medicine will follow in autumn 2004. The PLoS journals will retain all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer-review and high editorial and production standards, but will use a new publishing model that will allow PLoS to make all published works immediately available online, with no charges for access or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use.

SciDevNet
SciDevNet provides a variety of topical news, views and information about science, technology and development, including coverage of developments in Latin America, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, for which it offers a series of regional gateways. There are also book reviews, notices about meetings, grants and jobs, together with links to scientific organisations, news sources, journals, and aid/funding agencies. There are separate portals available in French and Spanish.

SciELO Scientific Electronic Library Online
The objective of the site is to implement an electronic virtual library, providing full access to a collection of serial titles (from Brazil, Cuba and Chile in a broad range of subjects languages ie Portuguese, Spanish and English), a collection of issues from individual serial titles, as well as to the full text of articles. The access to both serial titles and articles is available via indexes and search forms. There are separate portals in Portuguese  and Spanish.

Science and Technology Sources on the Internet. There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: Freely Accessible Databases for the Public (by Sandy Lewis)
A good descriptive inventory of databases that produce lists of citations to scientific literature, and which are freely accessible. In addition to the major free databases such as UnCover, Agricola, Medline, etc. it also includes searchable databases from learned societies, government agencies, electronic journal publishers, and various discussion groups-all freely accessible.

Scientific Commons
ScientificCommons.org aims to provide the most comprehensive and freely available access to scientific knowledge on the internet. The major aim of the project is to develop the worlds largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. Currently over 900 repositories are searched.

SCIRUS
A specialist search engine for scientific, technical and medial information sources. It offers two types of services: Web sources provide information for which no subscription or online registration is required. Scirus searches the entire Web and excludes sites with no scientific content. Examples of Web sources are university Web sites, learned society pages, scientists home pages, preprint servers, commercial companies, etc. Membership sources are information sources for which either a paid subscription or online registration is required, and often including peer-reviewed scientific information not directly accessible by standard search engines.

Washington DC Principles
See above

WorldWideScience.org
WorldWideScience.org is a global science gatewayaccelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases and portals.