Open Access

The articles published in an open-access journal that is indexed by the doaj, pmc-nih, unpaywall and core are flagged as open access in the Lens. The open access license type is also mentioned here. Scholarly Search results can be filtered by the Open Access Category. You can include or exclude the open access category to limit the search result by open access colour category or open access license type.


Location

The open access info is provided below the scholarly work information in the individual summary page whenever available. Here the link to the publisher’s website and the full text is also shown.

Open Access Colour

  • Gold: Published in an open-access journal.
  • Green: Toll-access on the publisher page, but there is an open copy in an open access repository.
  • Bronze: Free to read on the publisher page, but without a clearly identifiable creative commons license.
  • Hybrid: Free under an open license in a toll-access journal.
  • Unknown

Open Access License Types

  • CC BY – This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
  • CC BY-NC-ND – This license is the most restrictive of the main CC licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
  • CC BY-NC – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
  • CC BY-NC-SA – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
  • CCO – Public Domain Dedication, allows others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.
  • Elsevier User License – Articles published under an Elsevier user license are protected by copyright and may be used for non-commercial purposes. Users may access, download, copy, translate, text mine and data mine the articles.
  • CC BY-SA – This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
  • Implied OA – Has evidence that an OA license of some kind was used, but it is not reported directly on the webpage at this location.
  • Publisher-Specific – Each license is specific to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
  • Unknown – License information unavailable or does not exist.

Open Access Source

Open access status is determined using a combination of data sources for open access evidence, including: Unpaywall, the Directory of Open Access Journals (where the scholarly work is published after the journal DOAJ listing date), CORE full text availability, listing in PubMed Central, or listing in an “rXiv” preprint repository (including ArXiv, bioRxiv, ChemRxiv and medRxiv). Open access data sources include:

You can view the coverage of data sources for open access information here.

Updated on July 30, 2021

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