Jisc Open Policy Finder (formerly SHERPA/RoMEO) summarizes journal copyright transfers and permissions. It includes tools for journal policy, open access compliance, transitional agreement look-up, journal details, and record information.
Ulrich's Web which can be found in our list of library databases can tell you if a journal is peer reviewed as well as where it is indexed online.
You can search by a specific journal title or by keyword under the advanced search option. Be sure to select "keyword" from the drop down menu if you would like to search that way. In this example I've narrowed my search to active, academic journals, published in English.
Once you pull back results you can continue to narrow your search. Ulrichs contains icons to quickly show you if a journal is electronic web based only, refereed, or on open access publication.
Once you click on a specific journal title you can find out how often they publish, where you can find that journal full text in an electronic database, and where you can find the citations indexed in electronic databases.
Why? According to the traditional publication agreement, all rights —including copyright — go to the journal. You probably want to include sections of your article in later works. You might want to give copies to your class or distribute it among colleagues. And you likely want to place it on your Web page or in an online repository if you had the choice. These are all ways to give your research wide exposure and fulfill your goals as a scholar, but they are inhibited by the traditional agreement. If you sign on the publisher’s dotted line, is there any way
to retain these critical rights?
Yes. The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons , established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.