Finding open access research articles

Note: This post is a response to this task of an online course on open science I am following.

As an exercise, I searched for open access (OA) research articles published after 2008 and related to "GBIF" AND "data quality".

Search tools

I tried four search tools:

I found it surprising that not all of these offer the option to filter on open access only. I am curious to know if this is mostly because of technical or other limitations.

Finding the license

For three articles, I dug a little deeper to find the license. Two of these use and clearly indicate Creative Commons Attribution (coincidentally these two were not found by ScienceDirect):

Hill A.W., Guralnick R., Flemons P., Beaman R., Wieczorek J., Ranipeta A., Chavan V., & Remsen D. (2009). Location, location, location: utilizing pipelines and services to more effectively georeference the world’s biodiversity data. BMC Bioinformatics, 10(Suppl 14), S3. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S3

Belbin L., Daly J., Hirsch T., Hobern D., & La Salle J. (2013). A specialist’s audit of aggregated occurrence records: An ‘aggregator’s’ perspective. Zookeys (305), 67-76. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.305.5438

The other one:

Costello M.J., Michener W.K., Gahegan M., Zhang Z., & Bourne P.E. (2013). Biodiversity data should be published, cited, and peer reviewed. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(8), 454-461. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.002

… (which was not found by PubMed Central and DOAJ) can be downloaded as pdf (= OA), but if you actually want to do something with the content, you have to indicate in a very detailed manner what you want to (re)use the article for. Very few use cases seem to be free. In other words: yuck!

I am quite familiar with the Creative Commons licenses, but now I realize what a mess you get if those aren’t applied. This OA article also demonstrates that the term “open access” doesn’t tell you that much: there’s still a whole range of how open something really is.