These are open resources available to extension partners that are in other countries and institutions.
Open databases with Open content
- PubMed CentralPubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
- PubAg from the USDAPubAg covers all of the core topics of the agricultural sciences including nutrition, food safety, food quality, animal and crop production and protection, natural resources, sustainable agricultural systems, rural development, agricultural economic and policy issues, agricultural imports and exports, agricultural statistics, extramural research, and Extension education.
- PLANTS DatabaseThe PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. Fact Sheets provide brief descriptions of a plant, its uses, and cultural recommendations. Plant Guides are similar but more extensive. Both are provided as PDFs. The database also includes an image gallery of photos and line drawings of U.S. plants plus cultivated or foreign taxa.
- Biodiversity Heritage LibraryThe Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends – more than any other science – upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity.
- AgEcon SearchAgEcon Search contains the full-text of working papers, conference papers and small journals in agricultural, development, energy, environmental, resource and other areas of applied economics
- Google ScholarUse Google Scholar to find articles from academic publishers, professional societies, research institutes, and scholarly repositories from colleges and universities. You may be able to find open PDFs in the search results.
- AGRIS-FAO (public version)Information for international agricultural research, from 1975 to the present.
Open Access Journals
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)A one stop shop for Open Access Journals (journals with a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access). Journals must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included. All subject areas are covered. Uses can search by journal title or browse titles. No searching of contents of journals is provided. Journals listed in the DOAJ will also be listed in our Journal Title Database.
- Scientific Research (SCIRP)SCIRP publishes over 200 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals over a wide range of disciplines including Biomedical & Life Sciences, Earth & Environmental Sciences, Medicine & Healthcare to name a few.
Digital Libraries, Open repositories, and Other guides
- The AGORA DatabasesThe AGORA programme, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of up to 15,500 key journals and up to 48,000 books in more than 115 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.
- Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAROpenDOAR is the quality-assured global directory of academic open access repositories. It enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held
- HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new windowHathiTrust provides access to millions of books and other materials. Full text searching of most books is available and books in the public domain (generally older books) can be freely viewed and/or downloaded. Books still in copyright have more limited access. Users with print-reading disabilities can apply for special access to digitized works by emailing wilsref@umn.edu.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library (OTL) is managed by the Open Textbook Network at the University of Minnesota. Books published by many open publishers, such as OpenStax, BC Campus, Open SUNY, and more are aggregated in the OTL. Anyone can suggest a title be added to the library, but the book must meet these criteria.
The OTL currently includes over 600 high quality open textbooks in a wide variety of subject areas.
All textbooks are free to use, adapt, and distribute. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.
Textbooks in the OTL have been peer-reviewed by experts from a variety of colleges and universities to assess quality.
Textbooks can be downloaded for now cost; many can be printed for low cost.
All OTL books are required to be in portable format; in many cases, accessibility is enhanced with the availability of EPUB versions.
OTL's FAQ: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/faq - OER CommonsCatalog of tens of thousands of OERs to freely use, share, and adapt for the classroom.
Over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER, ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery.
Provides a single point of access to over 500 major content partners.
OERs are evaluated using the Common Core State Standards rubric (CCSS) –www.corestandards.org
Resources can be uploaded to OER Commons or created using their web based "Open Author" tool
Open Science Foundation Preprints (searches multiple preprint services)
arXiv (covers a wide range of disciplines in natural and social sciences)
bioRxiv (Biology)
CORE Repository (Humanities Commons)
medRxiv (Health Sciences)
RePEc (Economics and Related Sciences)
SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
What is Sci-Hub?
Sci-Hub is a search engine that works in concert with a repository called Library Genesis (LibGen) to give researchers access to a cache of articles taken illegally from scientific journals. In April 2017, the repository held over 62 million articles. In addition to drawing on the Library Genesis (LibGen) repository, Sci-Hub also uses the login credentials of university employees to bypass institutional authentication barriers and access journal content to which the university has licensed access. When it accesses an article in this manner, Sci-Hub sends a copy of the article to the requesting party and deposits a copy of the article in LibGen for future use by others.
How does it work?
Sci-Hub seems to obtain these login credentials by two means:
- Academics who support the program willingly contribute their credentials to Sci-Hub;
- Academics unwittingly give Sci-Hub their credentials in response to phishing campaigns.
Please be careful!
Plug-ins
There are several browser extensions or plug-ins you can install that will search the internet for an open access version of a desired article.
- Open Access ButtonYou can enter an article’s URL, DOI (a unique identifier), title, or other information to check for free and legal open access versions. The OA Button also offers Chrome and Firefox extensions. Once installed, these extensions will automatically search for an open access copy. When an open access copy is not found, the OA Button can contact the author directly.
- UnpaywallYou can either directly search Unpaywall’s database of millions of open access articles by entering the DOI for an article, or install the Chrome/Firefox browser extension, which will point you to open access versions of paywalled articles.
Access for Developing Countries from Publishers
- TEEALA hard drive-based system with hundreds of ag journals, available at no or low cost to institutions in certain countries
- The AGORA DatabasesThe AGORA programme, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of up to 15,500 key journals and up to 48,000 books in more than 115 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life: AGORA, HINARI, OARE, ARDI and GOALI.
A sample of some programs offered by publishers:
- http://royalsocietypublishing.
org/developing-world - http://olabout.wiley.com/
WileyCDA/Section/id-406072. html - http://www.oxfordjournals.org/
access_purchase/developing_ countries.html - http://group.bmj.com/group/
customerservice/hinari - http://www.icgeb.org/~
bsafesrv/library/publications/ freeaccesscientpub.html - http://www.pnas.org/site/
aboutpnas/developingcountries. xhtml - http://www.sagepub.com/
librarians/purchase_ developing.sp - http://www.elsevier.com/about/
press-releases/corporate- social-responsibility/ elsevier-offers-entire- collection-of-journals-and- books-to-innovators-in- developing-countries-through- the-access-to-research-for- development-and-innovation- ardi-program
Last Updated: Jan 5, 2024 11:34 AM
URL: https://libguides.umn.edu/extensioninternational