Open Science Tools

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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, …

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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 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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…