It wasn’t necessarily difficult to find an open access in my field (Human Development) but it wasn’t as easy as searching through the databases offered through the library. Before I landed on this article, I found a different article in a journal that “supports Open Access,” but the specific article I chose was not open access.
The article I chose for this post is Personality, Family Correlates and Emotion Regulation as Wellbeing Predictors. When looking for this article, I went through ScienceDirect’s subject filter option within their Open Access articles and databases. I was struck, but not surprised, that most of the Open Access journals were from other countries than the United States. Many contained articles published in languages other than English.
This specific article came from a university in Romania and is clearly labeled on the digital access page as Open Access. Another article that I considered but didn’t choose specifically noted that funding for Open Access was given by Dutch Universities. The article came from the journal Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is copyrighted by Elsevier. This journal is a subset (focusing on the social and behavioral sciences) of the larger Procedia collection, which highlights free access to users and author-retained copyrights as some of its key features. The article itself was clearly labeled as Open Access with direct links to access and rights, as well as information about the Creative Commons license.
The larger/parent ScienceDirect touted its over 250,000 open access articles in a large banner at the bottom of the homepage, so it did seem to want to assert itself as in the Open Access movement, but the specific information about open access seemed to vary by journal/article and was thus nested within specific links rather than openly available from any site I saw.