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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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 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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…