Sydney Met encourages students and staff to use Open Access (OA) resources, which have been made available to the general public, free of charge, as long as they are used with due diligence and with full acknowledgement of sources. They provide unrestricted online access to research outputs such as journal articles and books. OA content is open to all, with no access fees, though you may be limited by your location and you may have to register before you can start using some of them.
To help you identify useful OA resources we have listed key general resources for both journals and books as below:
Peer-reviewed articles on current issues, challenges, and responses facing social work practice and education.
An interdisciplinary journal aims to explore the current and future potentials for social justice which includes legal, moral and economic issues.
Journal of Comparative Social Work
This journal publishes two types of peer-reviewed scientific articles on subjects of importance for social work, with a special emphasis on comparative research on different aspects. This includes: Comparative studies and single site studies that also generate insight and knowledge in various geographical/cultural and national settings.”
The Journal of Family Strengths (JFS), formerly Family Preservation Journal, is an open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed online journal…devoted to presenting theoretical, practice, and evaluation articles on the strengths perspective in family-centered practice to improve services that promote and sustain family systems.
Social Work & Society: International Online Journal
Dedicated to critical analysis of the relationship between social work, social policy, the state and economic forces.
Building information equity in social work with open educational resources and open access to research
Social Work Education from OER Commons
Social Work education collection resources from OER Commons
Social Work Collection – from OER Commons
This book was written by MSW students as their final project for their Capstone class at Ferris State University.
Social Problems: Continuity and Change
More journals:
BioMed Central is an open access publisher of over 200 free online academic journals specializing in subjects related to science, technology and medicine. Areas of interest to social workers include public health, substance abuse, Alzheimer’s research and health care policy.
ERIC is a federally supported database of education-related articles
From the website: “DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.”
All books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded as PDFs for free by registering for a free account. Browse topics like aging, children, youth & families, policy, reviews and evaluations, population and fertility studies, women and minorities.
Follow the latest bills in Congress. Find information on Congressional votes. Learn who sits on which senate or house committees and how they voted. “OpenCongress helps you track all the actions by your elected officials and what people are saying about them.
Reports written by the Congressional Research Service in order to keep members of Congress and their staff up to date on a number of important policy and government issues.
OpenDOAR is a directory which links to open access repositories from around the world. These repositories contain a wealth of freely available scholarly articles, data and dissertations from leading universities. Browse individual repositories or search across all repositories to find articles written by faculty and scholars from these universities.
PsycArXiv is also a disciplinary repository. PsycArXiv includes clinical psychology, developmental psychology and other related areas.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.” PLoS journals are concentrated in the areas of biology, medicine and genetics but health policy, mental health, public health and other health areas may be of importance to some social work researchers.
Search open access journals, conference proceedings, academic repositories and recent (since 2014) monograph series.
Open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.
This site acts as a repository for scholars in social sciences fields to share their research. Authors may upload and share their papers for no charge and papers are free or very low cost to download.
Links to collections of freely available, open access research from Taylor & Francis journals by the following subject catagories: Health, HIV/AIDS, Sexuality & Sexual Health and Social Work.
Australasian Journal of Information Systems
IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society
International Journal of Computer Engineering and Information Technology (IJCEIT) , abbreviated key title: Int. j. comput. eng. inf. technol / ISSN: 2412-8856 (Online) has been established since 2015. IJCEIT is a scholarly online, open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly, and fully refereed journal focusing on theories, methods and applications in computer engineering and information Technology. This journal financed by Dorma Trading Est, publisher. It is an international scientific journal that aims to contribute to the constant scientific research and training, so as to promote research in the field of Computer Engg and IT.
Journal of Computer and Information Technology
Journal of Computer & Information Technology (JUCIT) is internationally indexed and double blind peer reviewed journal. The editorial board comprises of world renowned scientists of diversified fields from different nations and continents. The Journal is registered in International ISSN number India office. The International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Technology is published from Orient region, south East Asian region Bhopal India.
Open Textbooks for Information Technology
Open Data Structures: An Introduction
Offered as an introduction to the field of data structures and algorithms, Open Data Structures covers the implementation and analysis of data structures for sequences (lists), queues, priority queues, unordered dictionaries, ordered dictionaries, and graphs. Focusing on a mathematically rigorous approach that is fast, practical, and efficient, Morin clearly and briskly presents instruction along with source code.
Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology
Information Systems: A Manager’s Guide to Harnessing Technology is intended for use in undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Management Information Systems and Information Technology.
Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
Suppose you want to build a computer network, one that has the potential to grow to global proportions and to support applications as diverse as teleconferencing, video on demand, electronic commerce, distributed computing, and digital libraries. What available technologies would serve as the underlying building blocks, and what kind of software architecture would you design to integrate these building blocks into an effective communication service? Answering this question is the overriding goal of this book—to describe the available building materials and then to show how they can be used to construct a network from the ground up.
This book covers the basics of project management. This includes the process of initiation, planning, execution, control and close out that all projects share. This book has been adapted by the author as of August 15, 2014. The adaptation includes Canadianized content, PowerPoints, Audio Files, and Chapter Questions, which are located in the book’s appendixes.
Open educational resources (OER) for the study of Information Technology are:
BC Campus Open Textbook Library
Lists open textbooks in a number of subject areas. It also includes a directory of other open textbook sites and a guide to using open textbooks
A database of interactive tutorials, quizzes, timelines, and simulations that can be downloaded and integrated into Moodle.
Directory of Open Access Books
A discovery service that points to Open Access books that can be found elsewhere. It enables you to search the description of the books and to download the books from the publisher’s site.
eCampusOntario Open Textbook Library
This repository offers a curated collection of textbooks, many of which have been reviewed and vetted by educators across Canada.
Knowledge Unlatched makes scholarly content freely available to everyone by transitioning monographs and journals in a wide variety of disciplines from paywalled to Open Access content.
George Mason University Libraries, in conjunction with Deep Web Technologies, has created an OER Metafinder that searches across several open repositories.
SUNY (State Universities of New York) has developed a search tool that currently searches content from many OER different sources
A digital public library and collaboration platform that contains high-quality OERs for all levels of education.
Open Access for European Networks (OAPEN)
The OAPEN Library hosts and disseminates OA peer-reviewed academic books mainly in the areas of the humanities and social sciences.
A not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by academics, Open Book Publishers is the largest independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK.
Educational materials organized in small modules and freely available to be customized as you wish. An initiative of Rice University.
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. Supported by the Open Textbook Network.
A global directory of thousands of Open Textbooks published using the Pressbooks platform.
Listed below are freely available textbooks on topics related to entrepreneurship and innovation.
Other Resources for Entrepreneurs from Marginalized Populations
Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals. Today, the independent database contains ca. 12000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. DOAJ is a membership organisation and membership is available in 3 main categories: Publisher, Ordinary Member and Sponsor. A DOAJ Membership is a clear statement of intent and proves a commitment to quality, peer-reviewed open access. DOAJ is co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (Principles) and DOAJ members are expected to follow these principles as a condition of membership. DOAJ reserves the right to reject applications for membership, or revoke membership if a member or sponsor is found to contravene the Principles.
Taylor & Francis Open journals Springer Open Access Journals Elsevier Open Access Journals SAGE Open Access Journals Wiley Open Access Journals Cambridge University Press Open Access Journals Oxford University Press Open Access Journals EBSCO Open Access Content EBSCO Free Research Databases JSTOR Open Content ProQuest Open Access Dissertations and Theses (PQDT Open)
Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
Open Access Theses and Dissertations
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 4,926,948 theses and dissertations.
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