Further to the previous post describing various types of open and closed access, I would like to bring people’s attention to a very useful service developed by Cottage Labs a year or so ago that automatically reports the degree of openness of various publications by looking at their license information.
Called Open Article Gauge, it is part of a family of resources and services called
HowOpenIsIt?, which also includes The Open Access Spectrum (OAS) developed by PLOS, SPARC, and OASPA, a written guide that makes it easier to determine how open journals and journal articles are across the spectrum between fully Libre Open Access and Closed Access.
Open Article Gauge reviews articles (identified by their DOIs or PubMed IDs) and identifies the licensing information associated with these publications. Where a license can be determined, the results page gives the name of the license, a link and details of the associated re-use rights. The Open Article Gauge service is available as a website, an API, and as source code. More details are given on the Cottage Labs OAG page.