Portals & directories

Open Access Directory is a Wiki about all things Open Access. Being a wiki, it's user driven but hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, MA, which maintains an editorial board. Among many other useful things, is a bibliography on Open Access (albeit not updated since March 2009), a directory of other OA wikis, and a list of worldwide events to celebrate Open Access Week in week 43 2009.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) received the SPARC award 2009. It's quite simply a large, searchable directory of journals - and to some extent journal content - that is Open Access. As of August 2009, DOAJ had 4,294 journals, 1,621 of those were searchable at content-level giving a total of 306,766 articles. DOAJ is maintained at Lund University Library and is funded by several organisations such as Open Society Institute; the brain-child of investor guru George Soros.

Public Library of Science (PLOS) is the product of a not-for-profit organisation of natural scientists. PLOS is active in advocating Open Access, but most importantly it maintain seven online peer-reviewed science journals within the fields of science and medicine. Needless to say, content is freely available. Recently PLOS published thier first progress report, which can be downloaded from their web-site. PLOS is based in California, USA and relies heavily on grants from various foundations.