When you are affiliated with a higher education instituion, you have information privilege. That is, you have access to Library-subscribed scholarly content that is not freely available on the open web. Little known fact: this access usually ends when you graduate.
Led by academic libraries and information activists, the Open Access movement provides an alternative: a bridge to to open scholarship, no matter your institutional ties. OA expands the content that is available across access barriers, and is gaining ground in the scholarly community. As you engage in your research, try exploring the following OA repositories:
BASE is a vast cross-disciplinary international metasearch for OA content.
The Directory of Open Access Journals covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals and aims to cover all subjects and all languages.
OpenDoar is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. From University of Nottingham, UK.
ROAR provides up-to-date visual access to a huge database of open access repositories.
Also, check out the Linked Open Data cloud:
These and many other OA resources will be available to you after you leave the Claremont Colleges. For more information on hundreds of open content and open data repositories, check out our Open Repositories & Research Data and Scholarly Communications and Open Access guides.
