Open Access Directory: ten years of creating simple factual lists to document the growth of open access

Anne Britton, Nancy Pontika, Peter Suber and Lisa Terrat

Abstract:
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD makes it easier for everyone to discover them, use them for reference, and update them. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA. 

The OAD was launched 2008 with only 5 OA lists, while it currently maintains 47 published lists and 10 lists under development. Apart from launching new lists, the OAD has recently improved the way this information is presented, by introducing a more dynamically sorted content with the use of wiki tables, such as the list “Journals that converted from OA to TA” . When relevant, the OAD lists now link from their scope notes to corresponding tag libraries from the Open Access Tracking Project , while for a growing number of cases the OAD lists have also a “See also” section at the bottom, linking to corresponding lists emerging in Wikidata. 

The OAD is a crowd-sourced volunteer project and depends on the community to keep its lists accurate and comprehensive. For those users who would like to add or update information to the OAD but are unfamiliar with the wiki syntax, we have provided a simple to use web form, where they can submit their content and an OAD assistant editor then adds the content in the corresponding OAD list. 

The OAD calls the Open Access community to visit the OAD and start contributing either with new content or by updating existing outdated content.