Going through back issues of journals is a first step for many researchers embarking on a new project. Large databases like JSTOR and ProQuest can be very important for this kind of work but they are also expensive and many smaller, non-academic libraries cannot afford them or do not have enough users interested to make a license worth their while.
Open access journals help to ease this crunch for researchers. Open access publishing is a growing trend in academia, making access to scholarly material free via the Internet. The Directory of Open Access Journals provides access to over five thousand journals, all meeting the project’s criteria for open accessibility and quality, which include a regular publishing schedule and editorial oversight of content. The project was originally developed by the Lund University libraries in 2002 as a way to help the growth of the open access trend in scholarly publishing, gathering titles into a single location for easier use by researchers.
Topics covered in the DOAJ including agriculture and food sciences, history and archaeology, and the health sciences. Researchers interested in the history of the sciences, medical technology, public health, or more specific topics such as individuals, particular diseases or conditions, or geographical locations may also wish to take advantage of the search function rather than browsing by pre-arranged topics. Searching for ‘public health’, for example, returns over 10,000 hits.
The DOAJ does not provide the same historical depth and range as for-fee collections such as JSTOR, but it does give researchers a great way to look through recent scholarship and get a broad sense of work being done in a given field.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!