Directory of Open Access Journals
The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.
For publications, the Open Access Task Force is using the Budapest Open Access Initiative’s definition of Open Access, and is guided in particular by this: "By "open access" to this literature [peer-reviewed journal articles and preprints], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."
The Open Access Journals was founded with a mission to develop a reliable platform and to provide unrestricted access to scientific literature for rapid dissemination of recent updates in various disciplines of science and technology. Readers can have access with no cost and avail the facility to enrich their scientific understanding in the relevant topics.
How It Works at PLOS
PLOS applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to works we publish. This license was developed to facilitate Open Access—namely, free immediate access to, and unrestricted reuse of, original works of all types. Under this license, authors agree to make articles legally available for reuse, without permission or fees, for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute or reuse these articles, as long as the author and original source are properly cited. Additionally, the journal platform that PLOS uses to publish research articles is Open Source.
