Open Science Tools

The AEA RCT Registry is a public registry for randomised controlled trials in economics and the social sciences, maintained by the American Economic Association (AEA). Researchers can document their s…

The specialist repository AgEcon Search is operated by the University of Minnesota and contains over 150,000 freely accessible full texts. These come from the fields of agricultural economics and appl…

All Contributors is a bot for projects on GitHub bot for recognizing all contributors to an open-source project. By leaving a comment on an issue or pull request (contributions and discussions within …

alphaXiv offers open research discussion forums directly on top of single arXiv research papers. Each paper is equipped with one discussion forum, where users can comment line-by-line on the paper its…

The ARDC FAIR Data Self Assessment Tool helps researchers assess how FAIR their data set is. To do this, a series of questions must be answered in the self-assessment tool. Based on these answers, the…

ARGOS supports researchers in learning and applying best practices for creating open and FAIR data management plans (DMPs). This includes creating machine actionable DMPs, complying with DMP requireme…

ArXiv is one of the oldest and largest specialist repositories for preprints worldwide. It covers many subjects, particularly physics and mathematics but also economics. ArXiv contains more than 1.8 m…

The platform AsCollected supports documenting results-provenance in research publications. Thus, it captures information on when and how data for a paper were obtained and who was responsible for clea…

On the platform AsPredicted researchers can pre-register their studies. Others can read and evaluate those pre-registrations. Researchers have to answer nine simple questions about their research desi…

Asta is an online tool dedicated to helping researchers quickly find and summarise literature that matches their research idea. The scholarly research assistant works with a corpus of 108 million scho…

Audacity is a free, open-source audio software for multi-track recordings and for editing audio files. It is available for Linux, macOS and Windows and other operating systems.

B!SON is a free recommendation service for publishing in open-access journals. It can be used directly in a browser and does not require registration. Researchers can enter a manuscript’s title, abstr…

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is one of the largest search machines in the world for content from Open Access repositories. BASE includes over 270 million documents of over 8,000 data su…

BCcampus OpenEd is a collection of textbooks for higher education as Open Educational Resources (OER). Its content can therefore be read and downloaded free of charge. Most content is offered under a …

BERD Data Portal is a data repository. You can search and browse various types of data relevant for research in business studies, economics and social sciences. Each dataset is described using compreh…

Bookmarks can be managed and publications used jointly with BibSonomy. Content is developed by several users together, so that it thereby functions as a social bookmarking system. BibSonomy offers fle…

Bookdown is an open-source R package that allows writing books, long articles and reports using R Markdown. It supports a variety of programming languages, as well as graphics and interactive applicat…

CFF Init is a user-friendly online tool for creating Citation File Format (CFF) files for software or code. CFF is a simple format that allows researchers and developers to add citable metadata about …

CiteAs makes it easier to cite correctly, not only literature but also a broad range of research output including software and datasets. Just type or paste for instance an URL, a DOI or a search term …

In the Clarivate Links Open Access Journal Title List you can search for Open Access journals with impact factors, that are linked via Web of Science. A search request or the journal browsing can be u…

Codeberg is a collaboration platform and a Git-based version control service for open source projects. It offers a privacy-friendly alternative to GitHub and GitLab.

CODECHECK is an initiative in which independent, volunteer “codecheckers” run the code underlying scientific articles and confirm that the calculations and results are indeed reproducible. Researchers…

COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) is dedicated to training and supporting editors, publishers and others involved in publications. The aim is to move forward the culture of publishing in a direct…

CORE is a search machine that summarises Open Access publications from different data providers. It contains data from more than 10,000 institutional and specialist repositories and publishers. It is …

CORE Discovery provides a Chrome browser extension that gives researchers one-click access to Open Access versions of research publications when they reach a paywall. Behind it, thanks to CORE , is a …

CORE (Curriculum Open Access Resources in Economics) contains free textbooks such as "The Economy" and other teaching materials for a new way of teaching economics. This includes lecture materials, il…

The Creative Commons License Chooser supports the selection of a suitable licence to publish publications or other materials.

CWTS Journal Indicators is a bibliometric tool. It aims to provide researchers with insights into the scientific impact of more than 20,000 research journals. The indicators have been calculated by Le…

The Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) is an international open-source platform for the collaborative creation of data management plans (DMPs) in line with the FAIR principles. Researchers applying for fun…

DataCite is an international initiative to support access to research data. On the one hand, it offers an international search machine for research results in which a search for registered datasets is…

DataCite is an international initiative to support access to research data. On the one hand, it offers an international search machine for research results in which a search for registered datasets is…

Dataverse is an open source software for setting up a repository for research data, which can be used by journals or research institutions, among others. Researchers can use the general Harvard Datave…

Datavzrd makes it easier to understand and utilise complex data. The tool transforms tables into interactive, visually appealing HTML reports. This allows users to quickly and clearly visualise their …

DINI (German) certifies Open Access publication services in Germany. The directory of institutional and specialist repositories is a good starting point for German-speaking researchers if they are loo…

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) contains over 40,000 scholarly OA books. They have undergone peer review. A detailed search can be used to narrow down the results. DOAB also contains textboo…

The Directory of Open Access journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated directory. It indexes high-quality Open Access journals with Peer Review procedures worldwide and makes them accessible. This databa…

The Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) is a quality-checked global directory in which scientific Open Access repositories with different types of content, including research data, can be…

The DMP tool helps in the preparation of data management plans. Researchers from participating institutions can log in from a corresponding account and then profit from an institutionally adjusted imp…

Docker is an Open Source platform that enables developers to create, deploy and run applications in containers. These containers include all the necessary components, such as code, runtime, system too…

EconBiz offers the possibility of searching for relevant economics publications. Thanks to the filter option, the search can be limited to content that is readable free-of-charge by setting a tick nex…

EconStor is the Open Access publication server of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. Economics and business studies researchers and research institutions can use it to disseminate the…

Emporion is a platform for Open Research Data and data papers from social and economic history. It allows searching for Research Data and data papers. Likewise, time series, historical statistical and…

Endnote Click, previously known as Kopernio, is a free-of-charge browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. With one click it gives you legal access to freely accessible journal articles. To do this, i…

F-UJI is an automated FAIR data assessment tool. It can be used to check the extent to which an individual data record complies with the FAIR principles . After entering a persistent identifier (such …

The FAIR Assessment Tool helps you make your data FAIR. The tool uses an online questionnaire for self-assessment and gives ideas for improving the FAIRness of data. It helps you identify gaps in term…

The FAIR Check tool helps you to evaluate the extent to which your research data complies with the FAIR principles. Simply click through a self-check questionnaire. The results are displayed visually.…

FAIR-Aware is a knowledge testing tool for FAIR data. Researchers can use it to test their knowledge in order to make their datasets FAIR before uploading them to a data repository. For this purpose, …

FAIRsharing is a helpful tool – it offers a curated, searchable overview of data and metadata standards, linked to databases and data policies. Its central focus lies in life sciences, environmental s…

Figshare is a commercial multimedia-repository with DOI-allocation, in which researchers can secure and share their research results. These also include illustrations, datasets, photos and videos. Fig…

Free Your Science helps researchers to “free up” their already published articles from paywalls through self-archiving in Open Access. To do this, these publications are searched for using ORCID iDs, …

GIMP is an open-source image editing programme and thus a counterpart to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. You can use GIMP to create and edit photos and digital graphics. It can be installed under Lin…

GitBook allows you to create books in Markdown while integrating content from the internet. It offers optional synchronization with GitHub repositories. As it was originally created for technical docu…

GitHub is a web-based platform and repository for version management of source code of mostly Open Source software projects. Version control is based on Git, the software for distributed version contr…

Similar to GitHub, GitLab offers the management and hosting of Source Code in software development projects and is particularly suitable for Open Source projects. It is based on Git, the system for di…

Glitch is a code editor and an open remix platform for remixing and publishing web applications, such as interactive exercises. You can use it to remix web applications. It does not require extensive …

You can search for research documents with the search machine Google Scholar. The search is free-of-charge. The hits include Open Access full texts as well as chargeable documents. Google Scholar work…

GoogleScholar OA Status is a Browser extension for Google Scholar that displays Open Access status labels (Gold, Green, Bronze, Hybrid) directly in search results and links to legally available open v…

GoTriple is a discovery platform aiming to foster networking and collaboration in the humanities and social sciences. It supports searching, finding and networking. Noteworthy is its multilingualism, …

Gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library) is a cross-platform software package for econometric analysis that runs locally on the computer. It includes all the basic statistical tech…

With H5P you can design interactive elements and exercises for online educational materials via the browser, for instance work/questionnaires or a quiz. You can later integrate these into your own web…

Hypothes.is is an open source software project that aims to collect comments to statements that are accessible online in some kind of form. It filters and ranks these comments in order to evaluate the…

IDEAS is a comprehensive bibliographic database for the field of economics and accessible online free-of-charge. It enables searches to be carried out via a search template and browsing. It is based o…

IDEAS/RePEc Simple Impact Factors for Journals is a list containing a simple impact factor for journals covering primarily economics. It is calculated from the ratio of the number of citations to the …

Inciteful is a web-based tool for searching and analysing academic literature. It supports researchers in identifying relevant publications and in better understanding relationships between papers bas…

JabRef helps to research, collect, organise and cite literature. It offers both desktop apps as well as browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox und Edge. JabRef is developed by researchers for research…

It’s useful to consult the Journal Checker Tool (JCT) to help in the selection of a journal. The tool is a search machine that checks whether a journal complies with the Open Access policy of the fund…

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual evaluation of research journals, published by Clarivate Analytics. JCR contains information about research journals in the social and natural sciences, incl…

The Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics (JCRE) is the successor to the International Journal for Re-views in Empirical Economics (IREE). It aims to become the leading journal in economic…

Julia VS Code is an extension of the free Open Source development environment Visual Studio Code (VS Code) from Microsoft. It offers a wide range of functions that are specially tailored to the needs …

Jupyter is a very new open source platform that is in the process of becoming the standard platform for the exchange of research results. It supports interactive research data evaluations and scientif…

Jupyter Book is an open-source tool that allows you to create structured, interactive books or documentation from Jupyter Notebooks and Markdown files and publish them as a website. Code blocks (for e…

Various providers offer data for the social, behavioural, educational and economic sciences. KonsortSWD offers the possibility of searching for social and economic data in most of the 39 research data…

LiaScript is a Markdown-based project that allows you to create interactive open and interoperable educational content with little or no programming knowledge. For this purpose, LiaScript extends Mark…

LibreOffice has established itself as a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office package. Like many open source projects, the project is financed to a considerable extent by voluntary do…

The License Clearance Tool is a wizard for selecting a suitable licence, for example for data sets or software. It offers two approaches for "clearance": On the one hand, a clearance based on an exist…

Local Citation Network shows the relationships between articles in a visual citation network (graph) and is thus a good enhancement for literature search. The starting point is the entry or import of …

LyX combines the advantages of TeX/LaTeX with a graphical user interface. It therefore looks like a word processing programme, but LaTeX is generated in the background. It includes a formula editor an…

Maryland Open Source Textbook Commons (MOST) is a directory of open textbooks. Although it targets researchers in Maryland, it is also usable outside. The collaborative online directory aims to promot…

MOM searches 22 sources of Open Educational Resources (OER) simultaneously in real time, including OASIS and OpenStax. If the "Deeper search" box is activated, older materials that are public domain l…

Matilda is an open academic search engine aiming to make references and citation data as usable as Open Access scholarly texts and datasets. By treating academic documents and their metadata equally i…

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is a curated collection of free and online learning and support materials subject to Open Peer Review, as well as content crea…

On the MIT OpenCourseWare platform, MIT makes teaching materials available for free use, including videos of lectures and seminars (many, however, under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence), slide sets, literature …

The Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) is hosted by the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. It also contains over 50,000 economics publications from all over the world. These normally come from in…

MyBinder is a cloud platform that allows Jupyter Notebooks to be started and shared directly from a Git repository. Changes can be transferred back to the GitHub or GitLab repository, hosting right in…

Notepad++ is a text and code editor that offers an advanced alternative to the simple Windows Notepad editor. It runs on Microsoft Windows and supports multiple languages, offers syntax highlighting f…

With information on the type of Open Access, discipline and impact covering more than 55,000 journals, oa.finder helps researchers identify a suitable journal for Open Access publishing. To select a s…

OA.mg is a search engine for Open Access academic papers also offering a Chrome extension.  It contains more than 250 million papers in its index which it states as an unparalleled coverage. OA.mg als…

OAIster is a search machine for Open Access content with which the metadata of different document servers can be searched. That’s why OAIster describes itself as a virtual network catalogue for docume…

The Open Access Books Toolkit informs authors about how Open Access works for books and provides support for publishing.

Using the tool Octopub, developed by the Open Data Institute, you can learn about the future of Open Data publishing, according to the operator. It helps researchers to validate their data, select the…

OER Commons offers an extensive collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be sorted by topics, educational areas, terms of use or media formats, among other things. Searching and browsin…

OERhörnchen allows you to search for OER licensed under Creative Commons with a focus on German-language content. The OERhörnchen is a specially configured Google search that searches OER offerings su…

Open Access Helper (OAHelper) helps you to find legal Open Access copies of scientific publications. It is intended to combat the problem that although there are more than 50 million Open Access versi…

Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) is primarily a full text repository for Open Access books. It promotes the transition to Open Access for scientific books. To do this it provides op…

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) is a coalition of publishers who offer Open Access as a business model. They include major commercial publishers such as Springer and Wiley as …

The Open Data Editor (ODE) is a no-code desktop application that makes working with data easier without writing source code. It helps non-technical data practitioners to explore tables, to detect erro…

The platform Open Edition offers not only Open Access to books, but also to journals and blogs from the humanities and social sciences. Open Edition journals lists journals from the humanities and soc…

The Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open source journal administration and publication system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project to expand and improve access to research. Journal…

The Open policy finder provides an overview of the policies of almost all journal publishers (formerly known as SHERPA Romeo), for example with regard to parallel publication in Open Access repositori…

Open Research Europe is an Open Access publication platform for the publication of results from EU-funded projects from the research funding programmes Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. The platform co…

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free-of-charge network for research materials, an open source project management tool as well as one of the widely used registries for preregistration in the soci…

The Open Science Lense is a browser extension available for Chrome and Edge that comfortably adds Open Access options to literature searches. The extension automatically scans the visited web pages fo…

OpenShot is a free video editor that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.

The Open Textbook Library contains openly licensed textbooks. Among the criteria for inclusion is that they must be used in higher education teaching or be associated with a higher education instituti…

OpenAIRE EXPLORE is an international search machine for research results, including research data, software and publications run by the non-profit, community-driven initiative OpenAIRE.

OpenAlex is a freely accessible, interdisciplinary platform for over 480 million academic works, including journal articles, preprints, books, datasets and dissertations from around the world. It is r…

Open Big Data is a directory containing curated and open big datasets and publications for research in business, economics and social sciences. Focusing on FAIR research data, each dataset comes with …

On OpenICPSR, researchers can find and share social, behavioural and health sciences research data themselves. OpenICPSR is particularly suitable for the storage of replication datasets for researcher…

OASIS searches more than 440,000 Open Educational Resources (OER), drawn from 114 quality-assured sources and covering a wide variety of forms of OER. These include textbooks, courses and videos from …

OpenStax contains peer-reviewed textbooks. They are openly licensed and can be used online for free or printed at low cost. The books are created at Rice University with the help of grants from the Ga…

With Openverse (formerly CC Search / Creative Commons Search), there is a meta-search engine designed to find CC-licensed images and audio files. Perform a search in Openverse to also find resources t…

In OSF Preprints, over two million preprints can be searched for or found with the browsing option. Preprints can also be shared. Their impact can be followed with metrics such as the download figures…

Overleaf is a cloud-based collaborative online LaTeX editor for research documents. Thus, no software has to be installed to write, revise and publish documents using LaTeX. Overleaf supports collabor…

PaperHive describes itself as a coworking hub that brings researchers together. It enables collaborative reading, references management, Peer Review and proofreading in the community, among other thin…

Preprints.org is a preprint service that enables researchers to make early versions of their research outputs permanently available in Open Access and immediately citable. Content on Preprints.org is …

The Public License Selector helps in the selection of a suitable licence for the publication of software and data. You are asked a series of questions, which help to filter the number of hits so you c…

PubPeer makes it possible to give feedback to preprints or also other published scientific publications. The platform thereby serves the principle of Open Peer Review. Anonymous comments are permitted…

PYBOSSA is a web-based platform for running task-based citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Researchers can create projects, define tasks, and make them available to a larger group of contribut…

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing platform built on the conversion software Pandoc. It allows researchers to turn plain text and code into polished papers, slides, websites,…

RDMO (Research Data Management Organiser) supports institutions and researchers in the research data management of their projects. It makes it possible to compile all relevant planning information in …

The Registry of Research Data Repositories (Re3data) can help in the search for published research data and in the selection of a suitable repository. It offers a searchable directory of all the main …

The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a list with institutional, subject-related and thematic repositories and harvesters. As an overview list of repositories, it therefore serves as a st…

The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) is a searchable directory of Open Access policies and mandates from research funders, universities, and repositories. It helps re…

RePEc (Research papers in Economics) is a freely accessible networked database service for specialist economics information. It includes the publications listed on EconStor. However it also includes b…

Replication Research (R2) is an interdisciplinary, researcher-led peer-reviewed journal for replication research. It is hosted by the University of Münster and supported by the Münster Center for Open…

The Repository Finder can be used to search for suitable repositories for publishing research data. Only repositories that support the FAIR principles are displayed. It is a pilot project of the Enabl…

ReproducibiliTea is a grassroots movement that helps researchers set up Open Science journal clubs on site at their university. In the clubs, content and ideas for improving science, reproducibility a…

ResearchBox is a platform for easily sharing data, code, and materials, especially if you want to submit to a journal. All files are organised in boxes as a kind of standardised “bingo tables”. These …

ResearchRabbit helps you discover papers by building your own citation network. Just start by using one or more seed papers. On this basis it will find more papers relevant to your topic of interest. …

Retraction Watch is a blog about retracted publications and a database of retracted publications.

German research infrastructures can be found via the DFG-funded information portal RIsources (German Research Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / DFG). The research infrastructures listed pr…

RStudio Desktop is an Open Source development environment for the programming language R. The software was developed to make working with R easier, thus it offers a variety of tools and functions that…

SATIFYD (Self-Assessment Tool to Improve the FAIRness of Your Dataset) is a self-assessment tool for FAIR data. It helps assess the FAIR maturity of one's research data. By answering twelve questions,…

Scholarcy is a commercial tool that summarises articles with the help of artificial intelligence. This means that researchers can quickly evaluate how important a document is for their work, thereby s…

SciFlow is a browser-based editor for academic writing and publishing. Researchers and students can write manuscripts, theses, or journal articles and collaborate in real time. Formatting adjusts auto…

SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that contains scientific rankings for journals and countries. These rankings can be used to evaluate and analyse scientific fields. For example, journals…

SciRev helps you choose a journal for submitting your manuscripts by comparing publication speeds, peer review quality and other journal statistics. You can search for a journal with a quick review pr…

The platform Scite enables scientific articles to be detected and evaluated in an alternative way using smart citations. These show how a scientific paper is cited. To do this, they show the context o…

Searchsmart.org helps researchers to find better and faster by choosing the most suitable academic databases for their particular disciplines. It offers a comprehensive comparison of most of the popul…

As an AI-powered tool for research literature Semantic Scholar uses machine learning techniques to analyse papers, extract meaning and identify connections. It then surfaces these insights to help sch…

ShareYourPaper helps researchers to make their research visible and thereby to receive more citations. It makes self-archiving easy by helping to make postprints and/or “author accepted manuscripts” o…

SocArXiv is an Open Access platform for the social sciences (based on OSF Preprints). You can upload working papers, preprints and published papers on it, with the option of also linking data and code…

The Social Science Data Editors Template README is a freely available, standardised template that helps researchers create a structured and comprehensive README file for their replication package. Dev…

The Social Science Reproduction Platform (SSRP) aims to improve the computational reproducibility of social science research, hence the ability to reproduce the results, tables, and other figures foun…

Software Heritage is a long-term archive for source code that enables researchers to preserve, reference, and cite software as a first-class research output. The platform captures the code along with …

SowiDataNet|datorium is a research data repository for the fields of social sciences and economics. It enables researchers to share quantitative primary and secondary data easily and securely. The res…

SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is a website and document server for the rapid dissemination of research papers. An interdisciplinary service, it covers the entire social sciences. In terms of …

STAPLE (Science Tracking Across the Project LifEspan) is a web-based project management tool for research projects. It supports researchers in structuring projects across the entire research lifecycle…

templatereadme.org is a browser-based editor that helps researchers quickly create a README file for their replication package. Using modular, pre-built sections (for example dataset list, licence, in…

Texmaker is a free LaTeX editor. It runs on various operating systems (Windows, MacOsX, Linux). Texmaker includes many features, thus allowing you to create LaTeX documents within a single application…

TeXStudio is a free LaTeX editor aiming to make writing LaTeX easy and comfortable by integrating numerous features and assistants. The integrated writing environment is available for all major operat…

The Economics Network offers an extensive collection of resources for economists. Not all of them are Open Educational Resources (OER). The licence is indicated for some resources. The network's mater…

The Lens is an open platform for the mapping of innovations and useful information on them. In particular, this platform lists almost all patent information in the world as openly accessible, annotata…

The website Think. Check. Submit. offers criteria for the evaluation of the professionalism of a journal. It helps researchers to identify trustworthy journals and publishers.

Transpose – TRANsparency in Scholarly Publishing for Open Scholarship Evolution is a database that contains journal policies for the three fields Open (Peer) Review, co-reviewing and preprints. Transp…

Twillo is a German portal for Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education. You can find open educational materials there and share your own educational materials with others. In addition, Twi…

Unpaywall is an open database in which around 32 million free-of-charge accessible texts are collected. With the help of a browser extension for Chrome, it offers simple and legal access to the Open A…

VHB-Rating (previous version: VHB-JOURQUAL3) is a rating of relevant journals in business studies on the basis of decisions by members of the German Academic Association of Business Research (Verband …

Wikiversity is a sister project of Wikipedia for the collaborative creation of Open Educational Resources for higher education courses, for teaching in schools, and in adult education and self-study. …

Wispar is a free, open-source app for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux that allows researchers to subscribe to academic journals and topics across all academic disciplines to stay up to date wit…

The World Bank README Generator is a browser-based editor that guides researchers step by step through creating a README file for their replication package. The tool structures documentation according…

The ZBW Journal Data Archive is a free-of-charge service for publishers of commercial and economics journals. The aim is to offer the journals an easy-to-use infrastructure for the management as well …

Zenodo is a free-of-charge, cross-disciplinary repository that is primarily used for scientific datasets but also for science-related software, publications, reports, presentations, videos and similar…

Zotero is a free-of-charge tool for search and reference management, which helps in the finding, organising, citing and sharing of research results. It has a browser extension. The scope of function i…