As open access to scholarly publications becomes increasingly popular, a number of publishers, vendors, and institutions provide free access to their resources. McFarlin Library suggests accessing these open databases to facilitate your research:
- Academic Journals: It is the vision of Academic Journals to publish research articles in all areas of human study without financial restriction to readers using the open access model of publication. They strongly believe that the open access model will spur research across the world, especially as researchers gain unrestricted access to high quality research articles.
- African Journals Online: Open Access Titles: Historically, scholarly information has flowed from North to South and from West to East. It has also been difficult for African researchers to access the work of other African academics. In partnership with hundreds of journals from all over the continent, AJOL works to change this, so that African-origin research output is available to Africans and to the rest of the world.
- arXiv.org: arXiv.org provides open access to 1,224,705 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. arXiv is maintained and operated by the Cornell University Library with guidance from the arXiv Scientific Advisory Board and the arXiv Member Advisory Board, and with the help of numerous subject moderators.
- Biodiversity Heritage Library: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global 'biodiversity commons.' BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). BHL content may be freely viewed through the online reader or downloaded in part or as a complete work in PDF, OCR text, or JPG2000 file formats.
- Bioline International: Bioline International is a pioneer in the provision of open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries. These journals contain timely research on public health, international development, tropical medicine, food and nutritional security and biodiversity that would not otherwise be readily available to researchers in the developed world, or even within the country of publication. Bioline is not a publisher, but an aggregator that provides a free platform for journals who wish to participate in the global open access movement.
- BioMedCentral Open Access: BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher of 220 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals. The portfolio of journals spans all areas of biology and medicine and includes broad interest titles, such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine alongside specialist journals, such as Retrovirology and BMC Genomics. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central levies an article-processing charge to cover the cost of the publication process. Authors publishing with BioMed Central retain the copyright to their work, licensing it under the Creative Commons Attribution License which allows articles to be re-used and re-distributed without restriction, as long as the original work is correctly cited.
- Canadian Libraries (Internet Archive Canada): Internet Archive Canada provides access to a wide variety of books in electronic format focusing on Canadian history and culture. All are public domain or open access.
- Company of Biologists: The Company of Biologists is a not-for-profit publisher and UK charity. Established in 1925, The Company aims to promote research and study across all branches of biology. The Company publishes three internationally renowned, established journals: Development, Journal of Cell Science and The Journal of Experimental Biology, as well as two newer Open Access journals: Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM) and Biology Open (BiO).
- Coronavirus Research Database: Including coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak, this database curates openly available content related to coronaviruses. It includes thousands of open-access articles from the world’s leading publishers as well as current research from pre-print repositories such as arXiv and will continue to grow and evolve as more is learned about the pandemic.
- Digital Library of the Commons: The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. The DLC provides free and open access to full-text articles, papers, and dissertations. This site contains an author-submission portal; an Image Database; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus, and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.
- Digital National Library of Serbia: The Digital National Library of Serbia is built in accordance to all principles of open access to knowledge and information. The digitised material from the NLS Collections represents a public national treasure.
- DigiZeitschriften Open Access Journals: DigiZeitschriften is a non-profit organization, making digitized journals available online to support scientific work. DigiZeitschriften is divided into a restricted area and an open access area that is free to everyone.
- Directory of Open Access Journals: The aim of the Directory of Open Access Journals is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
- EBSCO OpenDisseratations: OpenDissertations is an open-access database built to assist researchers in locating both historic and contemporary dissertations and theses. Created with the generous support of the H.W. Wilson Foundation and the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston, it incorporates EBSCO’s previously released American Doctoral Dissertations, and features additional dissertation metadata contributed by select colleges and universities from around the world. Providing researchers with citations to graduate research across a span of time, from the early 20th century to the present, this database will continue to grow through regular updates and new partnerships with graduate degree-granting institutions.
- Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC): An online library of education research and information, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.
- GreenFILE: GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records.
- Gutenberg <e>: Columbia University Press is pleased to announce that Gutenberg-e is now an open access site. These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories. The American Council of Learned Societies also carry Gutenberg-e titles on their Humanities E-Book platform.
- Hindawi Publishing Open Access: Hindawi publishes more than 200 Open Access journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines. All articles published in Hindawi journals are open access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- InTech Open Access Books: InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Since 2004, InTech has collaborated with more than 82935 authors and published 2182 books and 7 journals with the aim of providing free online access to high-quality research and helping leading academics to make their work visible and accessible to diverse new audiences around the world.
- Independent Voices: Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
- Internet Archive: The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books.
- Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: Browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.
- Library of Congress Digital Collections: The Library of Congress Digital Collections provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.
- O'Reilly Open Books: Open access ebooks published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- OAPEN: 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 dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.
- Open Access Digital Library: The Open Access Digital Library, delivered through Gold Rush Electronic Resource Management System, provides free access to over 4,000 full text, scholarly journals in a variety of subjects.
- Open Book Publishers: Open Book Publishers is a social enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. They publish monographs and textbooks in all areas, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All of their books are available to read for free online.
- Open Library: Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.
- Open Research Library: The Open Research Library (ORL) is an aggregation of peer-reviewed, Open Access, scholarly monographs which is hosted on the BiblioBoard platform. Hosting makes the user experience consistent across the collection and enables users to maintain a single bookshelf for all of their Open Access book content.
- Organic Eprints: Organic Eprints is an international open access archive for papers related to research in organic agriculture. The archive contains full-text papers in electronic form together with bibliographic information, abstracts and other metadata.
- Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library.
- Publicly Available Content Database: Designed to complement other databases and collections, this database brings together or links to full text for publicly available scholarly content from a number of different sources from around the world. It includes content from major subject repositories such as arXiv as well as open access journals. Content includes journal articles, pre-prints, books, conference papers and reports.
- Pulp Magazines Project: The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century's most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information on the history of this important but long neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers.
- RAND Reports: RAND reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.
- Searchable Ornithological Research Archive (SORA): The SORA project is an open access electronic journal archive and is the product of a collaboration between the American Ornithologists Union, the Cooper Ornithological Society, the Association of Field Ornithologists, the Wilson Ornithological Society and the University of New Mexico libraries and IT department. This archive provides access to an extensive Ornithological literature of international scope, and detailed material documenting the history of Ornithology in North America over the last 120 years.
- SHAREOK Repository: SHAREOK is the joint institutional repository for the University of Oklahoma Libraries (OU) and Oklahoma State University Libraries (OSU). It serves as the home for the intellectual output of both communities, and will ultimately include digital dissertations, faculty publications, digital special collections, open access publications, open educational resources and much more.
- Technical Report Archive & Image Library: The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports.
- Universal Library: "The Universal Library Project, sometimes called the Million Books Project, was pioneered by Jaime Carbonell, Raj Reddy, Michael Shamos, Gloriana St Clair, and Robert Thibadeau of Carnegie Mellon University. The Governments of India, China, and Egypt are helping fund this effort through scanning facilities and personnel.
- University of Adelaide Press: The University of Adelaide Press was launched in 2009 by Nobel prize-winning author J M Coetzee. In the original tradition of university presses, we publish scholarly books by University of Adelaide scholars. The books are subject to external peer-review in line with government research quality requirements (such as HERDC and ERA in Australia) and our titles appear in libraries world-wide.
- WASET Open Access Journals: World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology is a scholarly open access, peer reviewed, interdisciplinary, monthly and fully refereed international journal focusing on theories, methods and applications in Science, Engineering and Technology. World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology aims to maintain a rapid editorial procedure and a rigorous peer review system. The submitted articles are peer reviewed within approximately three months of submission and the accepted full text articles are published on the internet immediately upon receiving the final versions free of charge.
- World Bank Open Knowledge Repository: The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. Through the OKR, The World Bank collects, disseminates, and permanently preserves its intellectual output in digital form.
