Open Access Research Publishing: Useful Open Access Resources

PubMed Central is an Open Access database of journal articles drawn primarily from the health sciences. As you can tell from the name it's part of the PubMed database produced by the National Library of Medicine in the U.S. 

SHERPA / RoMEO, from the University of Nottingham, is a database of academic and scientific journal publishers' policies regarding copyright and Open Access.

Sherpa divides policies into green, yellow or red to indicate the publisher's copyright policies, and its position on Open Access publishing. It's an invaluable tool for researchers who would like to publish in an Open Access journal but don't know which journals will permit this.

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that provides free copyright licenses to anyone who would like to share their work freely with others.

CC (as it's often known) allows you to decide the precise extent to which you would like to share your work, but always ensures that you are credited as its author. You can decide whether to allow your work to be redistributed, re-used, adapted for different purposes - all without surrendering your intellectual property rights.

OASPA is a group representing Open Access publishers. It promotes education about OA, sets standards for ethics and best practice and advocates for gold OA in publishing. Given the widespread problem of predatory Open Access publishers, OASPA is a useful resource for researchers trying to gauge the quality of a journal.

Data Portals   DataPortals.org is the most comprehensive list of open data portals in the world. It is curated by a group of leading open data experts from around the world - including representatives from local, regional and national governments, international organisations such as the World Bank, and numerous NGOs.

Data.gov  Promoting innovation and transparency through the publication of Irish Public Sector data in open, free and reusable formats

The Directory of Open Access Journals is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.