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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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 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 …

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…