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Open Access Resources: Home

October 19-26

What is Open Access?

By 'open access' to the literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself."

Source: Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Open Access Databases

Internet Archive: a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more

Listing of Open Access DataBases (LOADB): A large number of Government agencies, research institutions and academic institutions across the world create databases in various fields of science and technology.

MDPI: Accelerating Open Access: pioneer in scholarly open access publishing and has supported academic communities since 1996.

Open Access Journals: Researched information from 700+ peer reviewed in Medical, Clinical, Pharmaceutical, Engineering, Technology and Management Fields.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations: open access graduate theses and dissertations. Metadata  comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

Registry of Open Access Repositories: A searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents
  1. Open Textbook Library

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open license and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers, and members of the public.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

The Social Science Research Network is a repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others. SSRN provides 1,310,849 research papers from 1,483,653 researchers in 70 disciplines.

OER Commons Open Textbooks

OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum. Free, adaptable, openly licensed textbooks and supplemental resources.

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

 BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines, especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 340 million documents from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).
 

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

CORE (Connecting Repositories) provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of the world’s scholarly literature, collecting and indexing research from repositories and journals. It is, to our knowledge, also the world’s largest collection of full text open access research papers. Search 280M paper around the world.
 

arXiv.org

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
   

Open Access Ebooks Databases

  1. Many Books: Established in 2004, the database contains over 50,000 fiction and non fiction eBooks. The collection encompasses several genres ranging from fantasy, horror, romance, mystery, thriller, science fiction, biographies, action, adventure, children’s books, love stories and history education among others. Many Books provides instant updates and filters for quick browsing by author, genre, and language. You can download the Many Books app from the play store to access, download and read free books.

  1. Gutenberg: This is an online library of over 60,000 free eBooks in various subjects. You can search and browse for books by author, title, subject, language, type, popularity and more. Gutenberg provides a list of recently added, new and updated and has provision for notifications when new books are made available. The collection is freely offered to readers for education, enjoyment, enlightenment, and entertainment. Books on similar topics are arranged on the bookshelf alphabetically to ease access for readers.

  1. Listening Books: This database is a digital collection of audio books and other information materials ranging from fiction, nonfiction, newspapers and magazines. It is suitable for children and adults with specific learning difficulties including dyslexia, mental health conditions, anxiety, visual impairment or physical disabilities. It permits readers to download audio books. Visit to access Listening Books.

  1. Digital Book Index: The Digital Book Index is an online catalog of electronic books, texts and documents. It provides access to over 165,000 full-text ebooks from different publishers, universities and sites. The database contains reference books, children’s books, Literature and languages, social sciences, philosophy, law, mathematics, health and Medicine.

  1. World Digital Library: Launched by UNESCO and the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library (WDL) contains a rich source of free manuscripts, rare books, films, musical scores, prints, recordings, architectural drawings and maps. It aims at promoting international and intercultural understanding; expanding the volume and variety of online cultural content; providing resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and building capacity in partner institutions so as to narrow the digital divide within and among countries.

  1. Book Boon: This database contains more than 800 free eBooks, audio-visual learning materials and online courses for students and researchers. The collection is available in different languages and content is downloadable in PDF format. Subject areas covered are economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural sciences. .

  1. Free Computer Books: Free Computer Books is a directory of free eBooks, tutorials and lecture notes. The disciplines include; computer science, networking, programming languages, systems programming, linux books and mathematics. To access Free computer books, visit

  1. Open Access Publishing in European Networks: This is a comprehensive database that contains freely accessible peer reviewed academic books in the fields of humanities and social sciences. The collections are filtered according to subjects, publishers, language and date. The database serves as an open infrastructure and aims at increasing the discoverability of open access books.

  1. Public Bookshelf: The database provides access to different kinds of romance books ranging from contemporary, suspense, historical, regency, Inspirational, vampire, fantasy, paranormal and Western romance. It provides a platform for readers to read stories online and authors to publish their books at no cost. To access Public Bookshelf collection.

  1. ReadCentral: The database comprises of a vast collection of free nonfiction books, novels, dramas, poems, short stories and essays in different languages. ReadCentral can be used by people of all ages and backgrounds including; reading enthusiasts, students, researchers and on-the-go readers. The database provides a mobile version to enable the users to use mobile devices to access content. To access ReadCentral.
  2. Indian Academy of Sciences: Founded in 1934 with the sole goal of promoting and upholding the cause of science, the Indian Academy of Sciences currently publishes 10 science journals in different disciplines. The published journals undergo a rigorous peer view process and information is made available online through open access. To access the Indian Academic of Sciences database, visit:

  1. Open Textbooks: The database contains over 1024 academic textbooks that are peer reviewed, free, adaptable and openly licensed. Students, faculty and other users are free to download, edit and distribute the textbooks. Supported by the Open Education Network, the Open Textbooks database covers subjects like; business, computer science, engineering, education, humanities, medicine, natural sciences and student success. The site is time-saving since tables of contents and summaries for textbooks are provided.

  1. Free Books Centre: The database provides links to thousands of free online technical books. It comprises over 25 subject categories in the disciplines of physics, computer sciences, business, mathematics, medicine, engineering and law amongst others. To access the Free Books Centre.