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Open Access & Open Educations Resources: Free Databases

A guide to free academic scholarly databases and resources

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Academic Journals

Multi-Subject Database: Academic Journals is a broad-based publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals. Academic Journals currently publishes 111 open access journals covering art and humanities, engineering, medical science, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and agricultural sciences.

arXiv.org 

Open access to more than a million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

Hathi Trust

Database of millions of digitized books and publications. 

Internet Archive

A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Great for humanities and pop culture research. 

Open Textbook Library  

Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.

Open RN

Project funded by a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Education to create open Nursing Textbooks with open simulations.

Project Gutenberg

E-books; Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free e-books: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

PubMed Central

Health; PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Queer Liberation Library

The Queer Liberation Library fights to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ+ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community. Access to hundreds of free books and articles. 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.

Wiley Open Access

Science; Wiley Open Access journals are supported by a network of authoritative journals and societies as well as internationally renowned editorial board members. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. Wiley Open Access publishes a number of online journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.

A-Z Free Databases

Academic Journals

Multi-Subject Database: Academic Journals is a broad-based publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals. Academic Journals currently publishes 111 open access journals covering art and humanities, engineering, medical science, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and agricultural sciences.

African Journal Archive

African Studies * make sure the "free content" icon is selected. The African Journal Archive (AJA) is a Sabinet Gateway project in conjunction with the Carnegie Corporation that is making African research accessible to the whole world. The archive includes searchable collections of journal articles that have been digitized back to the earliest issues, a valuable resource for local and international libraries.

AgEcon

Agriculture/Economics; AgEcon Search is a free-to-user Web site that contains the full text of working papers, conference papers and journal articles in applied economics, including the subtopics of agricultural, consumer, energy, environmental, and resource economics. Contributors include academic institutions, government agencies, professional associations, and non-government organizations.

American Mathematical Society AMS Open Math Notes

A repository of freely downloadable mathematical works in progress hosted by the American Mathematical Society as a service to researchers, teachers and students.

ArchiveGrid

Archive Directory; ArchiveGrid includes over four million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,000 different archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.

arXiv.org  

Open access to more than a million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

Bentham Open

Science; BENTHAM OPEN publishes a number of peer-reviewed open access journals. These free-to-view online journals cover all major disciplines of science, technology, medicine and social sciences.

BioMed Central

Scientific Research; Free access to the highly rated journals published by BioMed Central.

BioOne Open Access

These journals cover a wide variety of subject areas, including plant sciences, zoology, paleontology, and entomology.

Bloomsbury Collections: Bloomsbury Open 2014

Multi-Subject; monographs from Bloomsbury's interdisciplinary Open Content programme, in subject areas such as politics and development studies, including titles from the Globalizing Sport Studies and 'What Is?' Research Methods series. These works are published on open content licenses, meaning that the full text is available online for free in html format, and the titles are also available for purchase as an institutional e-book collection.

Bloomsbury Open 2013

Multi-Subject; This collection includes 28 monographs from Bloomsbury's Open Content programme, in subject areas such as politics and development studies. Titles include Gary Watt's Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form, John D. Brewer's The Public Value of the Social Sciences: An Interpretive Essay and Robin Bunce & Paul Field's Darcus Howe: A Political Biography. These works are published on open content licenses, meaning that the full text is available online for free in html format, and the titles are also available for purchase as an institutional e-book collection.

Bloomsbury Open 2015

Multi-Subject; This collection includes 19 monographs from Bloomsbury’s Open publishing programme, in the subject areas of politics, international development and sociology. These works are published on open content licenses, meaning that the full text is available online for free in html format, and the titles are also available for purchase as an institutional e-book collection.

Bloomsbury Open Archive 2008 - 2012

Multi-Subject; This collection covers the entire backlist of Bloomsbury's innovative Open Content programme. This is an interdisciplinary collection, with a strong emphasis on politics, sociology, development studies and new media, including titles such as Martin Weller's The Digital Scholar and Guy Standing's The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. These works are published on open content licenses, meaning that the full text is available online for free in html format, and the titles are also available for purchase as an institutional e-book collection.

BMJ Open

Medical; BMJ Open is an online, open access journal, dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and therapeutic areas. The journal publishes all research study types, from study protocols to phase I trials to meta-analyses, including small, specialist studies, and negative studies. Publishing procedures are built around fully open peer review and continuous publication, publishing research online as soon as the article is ready.

Cambridge University Press Open

"We publish a number of Gold OA journals and books and work with publishing partners such as learned societies to develop OA in different communities."

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

American History; Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.

CiteSeerX

Computer/Information Science; CiteSeer was a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science, that has been replaced by CiteSeerX. Many consider it to be the first academic paper search engine. It became public in 1998 and had many new features unavailable in academic search engines at that time.

Congress.gov

Law; Search U.S. legislative information (bills, public laws, treaties, and more.

DATA.GOV

Data sets; Data.gov is managed and hosted by the U.S. General Services Administration, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. 182,131 datasets available as of 06/2016.

Directory of Open Access Books

Multi-Subject; Provides access to e-books on various subjects.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Multi-Subject; DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Dove Press Journals

Scientific and Medical Research; Dove Medical Press Ltd is a privately held UK company specializing in the publication of Open Access peer-reviewed journals across the broad spectrum of science, technology and especially medicine.

Early Journal Content- JSTOR

Multi-Subject; On September 6, 2011, we made journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world. This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR.

Elsevier Science Open Access Journals

All articles in open access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download.

European Views of the Americas: 1493-1750

History-Bibliography; This new bibliographic database is a valuable index for libraries, scholars and individuals interested in European works that relate to the Americas. EBSCO Publishing, in cooperation with the John Carter Brown Library, has created this resource from “European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed In Europe Relating to The Americas, 1493-1750,” the authoritative bibliography that is well-known and respected by scholars worldwide. The database contains more than 32,000 entries and is a comprehensive guide to printed records about the Americas written in Europe before 1750.

Gallup

Polls on Current Topics; Polls on topics such as:
Daily News, Politics, Economy, Wellbeing, World News

Google Public Data Explorer

Data sets; Google's Public Data Explorer provides public data and forecasts from a range of international organizations and academic institutions including the World Bank, OECD, Eurostat and the University of Denver. These can be displayed as line graphs, bar graphs, cross sectional plots or on maps.

Gutenberg Project

Access to over 50,000 free ebooks

Hathi Trust

Database of millions of digitized books and publications. 

Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Science & Technology; Hindawi publishes 405 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering all areas of Science, Technology, and Medicine, as well as several areas of Social Sciences.

InTech Books

STEM e-books; Hundreds of free Open Access Books in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine containing thousands of research articles and academic papers.

InTech Journals

STEM Journals; The first Open Access robotics journal published in the STM field and indexed in ISI Thomson Reuters. ... Open Access, international, peer-reviewed scientific journal which is addressed to a cross-disciplinary readership including scientists, researchers and professionals in both.

Internet Archive

A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Great for humanities and pop culture research. 

Listing of Open Access Databases

"The objective of Listing of Open Access DataBases (LOADB) is to create a web-enabled, linked, classified and categorized collection of Open Access Databases which one can access from a single portal. Although initial focus is on science and technology subjects, the ultimate aim is to include all subject areas." CSIR-URDIP does not guarantee the content of any database. Publishers are responsible for the information about their organization and their products.

Making of America

American History; The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints

Medknow

Medicine; The majority of our journals provide immediate free access to the full text of articles. Authors can self-archive their published articles.

National Bureau of Economic Research

Economics; The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community."[1] The NBER is well known for providing start and end dates for recessions in the United States.

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Medical; A part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world.

Nationmaster

Stats; NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from hundreds of sources. Using the forms below, you can get maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease. We want to be the web’s one-stop resource for country statistics on everything from obesity to murders.

NCBI Bookshelf

Life Science & Healthcare; NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from hundreds of sources. Using the forms below, you can get maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease. We want to be the web’s one-stop resource for country statistics on everything from obesity to murders. Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Search, read, and discover.

New York Public Library Picture Collection

Digital Images; Contains 30,000 high-resolution digital images taken from the New York Public Library's extensive collection of books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and prints. Most images are pre-1923, and the collection is especially strong in the areas of fashion and natural history.

OAIster

Digital Images; OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors.

OAPEN

Humanities & Social Sciences; The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.

Occupational Outlook Handbook

Dept. of Labor; Hosted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor this database provides information on a wide variety of occupations and includes educational requirements and job forecasts.

Ojibwe People's Dictionary 

The Ojibwe People's Dictionary is a searchable, talking Ojibwe-English dictionary that features the voices of Ojibwe speakers.

Open Access Music Journals

Hosted by University of Michigan Library.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations

Advanced research and scholarship. Theses and dissertations, free to find, free to use.

Open RN

Project funded by a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Education to create open Nursing Textbooks with open simulations.

Pluralism Project 

An ongoing research effort, the Pluralism Project studies and interprets religious diversity and interfaith relations in the US. 

Poetry Foundation

Access to poetry and other resources

Project Euclid

Math/Statistics-Only titles listed on the landing page are open access. Look for a green circle with a check mark for open access articles.

Project Gutenberg

E-books; Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free e-books: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

PubMed Central

Health; PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).

Redalyc

Science; Hundreds of peer-reviewed open access research journals, published by more than 500 institutions from twenty-two Ibero-American countries, indexed by Redalyc.

Registry of Research Data Repositories

Data sets; re3data.org has reached a milestone of identifying and listing 1,500 research data repositories, making it the largest and most comprehensive registry of data repositories available on the web. It has grown steadily since its launch four years ago to cover a wide range of disciplines from around the world.

Science.gov

Science; Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2200 selected websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results. Science.gov is governed by the interagency Science.gov Alliance.

ScienceDirect Open Access Journals

Science, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering and technology, physics, medicine and more.

SpringerOpen

Multi-Subject; Freely and permanently available online for anyone, anywhere. Open access publishing allows free access to and distribution of published articles and books.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines to create and maintain an up-to-date reference work.

Taylor & Francis Open Journals

Multi-Subject * Look for "Open access" in green; Articles that are open access will appear with the green “Open access” indicator in the list of search results.

The Avalon Project at Yale Law School

Political Science; Full-text of primary documents in law, history and diplomacy. Contains special collections such at 9/11, Cold War, and Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents. Also includes international documents.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Literature; Full texts can be obtained by searching either the chronological listing or the alphabetical listing in this site.

THOMASNET.com

Business; Freely searchable database of hundreds of thousands of North American manufacturers, suppliers, and products. Users can also browse the Thomas classifications to find manufacturers of specific products.

USA.gov

U.S. Government

Wiley Open Access

Science; Wiley Open Access journals are supported by a network of authoritative journals and societies as well as internationally renowned editorial board members. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. Wiley Open Access publishes a number of online journals across biological, chemical and health sciences.

WorldCat

Catalog; Online catalog of libraries worldwide. Search for: books, articles, media in one site. Usually referral information only, limited full-text.

WomanStats Project  

The WomanStats Project is a comprehensive database on the status of women cross-nationally. It contains over 170,000 data points and is growing every day, it covers over 350 variables for 175 nations with populations greater than 200,000 persons. The WomanStats Project began in 2001 with the aim of investigating the link between the security and behavior of states and the situation and security of the women within them.

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