Humanities & Social Sciences Graduate Student Guide
What is Open Access?
For students graduating, losing access to the university's library subscriptions can interrupt research goals and scholarly conversations. An alternative to library subscriptions are open access (OA) journals, which is broadly defined as scholarly material that is available, free of charge, to anyone with an internet connection and published under an open license. This section contains a selection of open access journals in the humanities and social sciences, as well as tips for how to evaluate open access sources.
Open Access Journals
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Cambridge University Presshundreds of journals in law, life sciences, humanities and law.
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Digital Commons Networkextensively curated by librarians and covers topics from arts, humanities, social sciences, law, hard sciences, and more.
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JSTOR Open Access Journalsjournals covering humanities, social sciences and hard sciences.
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Open Alexthousands of scholarly journals prioritizing the humanities, non-English languages and the Global South.
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Open Library of Humanitiespeer reviewed journals covering classics, modern languages, philosophy, theology, history, political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities.
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PubMed This link opens in a new windowProvides access to bibliographic information in Medline and other sources. (See the available Help Sheet). For full functionality, log in to your MyNCBI account..
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DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new windowDirectory of Open Access Journals is a service that provides access to quality controlled Open Access Journals.
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Sage Open Accesspeer reviewed journals in the social sciences, engineering and medicine.
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SpringerOpenOffers over 100 journals in all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences.
Evaluating OA Journals
List of resources to evaluate open access journals found on the web:
- Check to see if the journal exists in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which requires that all journals meet selection criteria.
- Check to see if the journal's publisher is a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association.
- Evaluate if the journal meets the criteria in Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing.
- Creative Commons Open License: learn more about copyright and Creative Commons License.