Open access resources for tourism, hospitality and events
What is open access?
Open access journals and articles are free to access and read.
Gold open access is where an author publishes their article in an online open access journal. In contrast, green open access is where an author publishes their article in any journal and then self-archives a copy in a freely accessible institutional or specialist online archive known as a repository, or on a website.
Definition from PUBLISSO
You’ll find a lot of open access content when you are searching Discover via the Library web page. You’ll also find open access material sometimes if you search Google Scholar or on subject databases. We thought we’d share some methods for finding open access content and some examples of the recently published articles or book chapters for tourism, hospitality and events.
Open Access on Discover (via Library Web Page)
When you search Discover you will be searching both our subscribed content and a lot of open access content including the Directory of Open Access Journals. You don’t need to do anything differently but you may notice the database listed in the bibliographic data will be ‘Directory of Open Access Journals’.
Open Access on Publisher Sites
You can often find open access content on big publisher sites as they may publish open access journals or enable authors to publish a specific article open access within a subscription journal. Below are a couple of examples of recent open access articles on publisher sites.
Gunnar, L., Ritter, C.S., Indrek, I. (2019) ‘Audiovisual Industries and Tourism: Forms of Convergence’ on ‘Emergence of Cross-innovation Systems –
[Book Chapter] Published online 20th March 2019.
This book chapter is published by EmeraldReach – The Emerald database lists open access content on their ‘Emerald Reach page’. You can filter by keyword, publication date and source type.
Chen, D.-J. (2018). Couchsurfing: Performing the travel style through hospitality exchange. Tourist Studies, 18(1), 105–122
[Journal article]
This journal article is published by Sage Journals as an open access article, within a subscription journal. You can keyword search open access content.
How can I check if there is an open access version of an article on another site?
Sometimes you may find an article on a publisher site and it is not an open access article. The good news is this doesn’t mean that it is not available. Many institutions such as universities have their own repositories, and they may make available the authors version of an article (just before it was published). This is called green open access.
So how can you check? There are browser plugins you can get that check the web and let you know if it finds a legal open access version on a repository.
- Unpaywall https://unpaywall.org/
- Kopernio https://kopernio.com/?lang=en
If you’ve got a question about using Kopernio or Unpaywall contact the Tourism Librarian Leanne Young leanne.young@sunderland.ac.uk
Open Access on Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a great search engine for open access academic information. It not only searches across many of the academic databases (for gold open access) but it also searches across institutional repositories (including our own) for green open access.
We’ve already shared a blog post about making the most of Google Scholar….
When you search on Google Scholar you will often see a full text link. In many cases this will be a link to a repository for example a University repository. In the screenshot below the article is available via the University of Greenwich Academic Literature Archive (GALA):
This infographic from HackCollege has some great tips for searching Google and they work on Google Scholar too.
Hopefully this blog posts gives you a bit of information about open access and some suggestions for finding open access material that you can use in your assignments.
If you have any questions get in touch with your librarian Leanne Young, library@sunderland.ac.uk
