New open access data sources on avldigital.de: BASE and OAPEN

With the module Finding literature, avldigital.de offers the Comparative Literature research community a specialised catalogue for research literature and information. In July we extended the offer by several data sources. A special focus is on the integration of Open Access publications relevant to Comparative Literature

All roads lead to ... Bielefeld? – The open access aggregator BASE

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world's largest search engines for scholarly web documents. The index currently comprises over 200 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. The sources are composed of repositories and bibliographies of universities and research institutions from all over the world, but also the Open Access products of scholarly publishers.

For avldigital.de a highly specialised selection was made from this broad and heterogeneous portfolio. The aim was to provide references to documents that are exclusively available in Open Access, as well as to guarantee a subject-specific selection. This is based on the integration of titles explicitly marked as relevant to literary studies by the sources supplying BASE. In this way we can offer a highly relevant and freely accessible selection of currently more than 37,000 titles, which is updated monthly.

OAPEN – Open Access Gold publications from European publishing houses

Like BASE, OAPEN is an aggregator for Open Access publications, but the platform aggregates exclusively Open Access Gold titles from European scholarly publishers. Incidentally, the consortium is also responsible for the Directory of Open Access Books and sets high standards for both the content and data quality of its suppliers.

Via OAPEN we currently integrate about 5,200 references of OA publications relevant for Comparative Literature. Among these are about 250 titles from transcript Independent Academic Publishing, which we make findable via a special search filter.