Putting Faith to Work (PE018): Open Access Journal Database

The Open Access Journal (OAJ) movement aims to provide unrestricted, free access to scholarly journals - as opposed to the costly and privileged availability via subscription to databases like EBSCOhost & ProQuest. 

Open Access journals are important because they give you access to:

• information even if you can't connect to the library catalogue (and hence EBSCOhost & ProQuest);
• some journals and articles which you can't access even via EBSCOhost or ProQuest.  

If Open Access journals can help like this, why do we bother with subscription journal databases, like EBSCOhost & ProQuest?

• Although EBSCOhost & ProQuest are expensive, they have definite benefits!

1. They are easier to use than OAJ databases
2. Their interfaces are much cleaner
3. They have more useful features

This short video gives an excellent overview of Open Access.

The DOAJ is one of the main collections of OA journals available. It contains 9000 OA journals covering science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

(Click on the homepage shown below, to access the DOAJ.)

JSTOR (Journal-STORage) is a free digital library of academic journals, books and primary sources. It has been developed by digitising print journals and storing them in a central archive.

(Click on the homepage shown below to access JSTOR.)

Please contact us if you have any queries.
    libraryhelpdesk@morling.edu.au

 (02) 9878 0201