DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome? Research. You know what’s not awesome? Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects. Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks. Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more. Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana- Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too. Free! And legal! They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies. Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things! Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen- Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access- Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this. Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

lesserjoke

Also, remember — there is a wide world of researchers out there, most of whom don’t give two figs about paywalls. Let people know what you’re having trouble accessing, and you’d be surprised how quickly a copy will find its way to your inbox. And if you do belong to an institution with a library, check out their interlibrary loan system, which is a more official way of getting things from behind a paywall at no cost to you.

anthrocentric

Bolded. Let me know if there’s an article you want and I’ll see if I have access to it.

Here are a couple more:

American Archivist Online provides free access to quite a lot of the materials published by the Society of American Archivists.

RUCore is the Rutgers University Community Repository. It is comprised of university research, primary source materials, and other collections. One of the collections it provides access to is (for example) the New Jersey Digital Highway, which is a collaboration between various libraries, museums, and historical societies to collect information on state history and culture.

The GSE Open Archive is Stanford University’s institutional repository which provides open access to materials produced by faculty and grad students at the university.

The New York Public Library has tons of materials in its digital collections which people can browse through for free. Their collections include access to thousands of maps and atlases of New York City.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a collection of digitized books and users may access some of the collection even if they are not affiliated with a partner institution.