The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), of the Institution of Education Sciences, allows you to search by topic for material related to the field of education. Links lead to other sites, where you may have to purchase the information, but you can search for full-text articles only.
The service primarily indexes journals, grey literature (such as technical reports, white papers, and government documents), and books. All sources of material on ERIC go through a formal review process prior to being indexed.
The arXiv e-Print Archive has been around since 1991 and is a well-known resource in the fields of mathematics and computer science. It is run by Cornell University Library and now offers open access to more than one million e-prints.
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is operated by the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, and it offers more than 100 million documents from more than 4,000 sources. Sixty percent of its content is open access, and you can filter your search accordingly.
The CIA World Factbook is a little different from the other resources on this list in that it is not an online journal directory or repository. It is, however, a highly useful research database for academics in a variety of disciplines. All the information is free to access, and it provides facts about every country in the world, including information about history, geography, transportation, and much more.
EconBiz is a great resource for economic and business studies. A service of the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, it offers access to full texts online, with the option of searching for open access material only.
BioMed Central provides open access research from more than 290 peer-reviewed journals in the fields of biology, clinical medicine, and health. You can browse these journals by subject or title, or you can search all articles for your required keyword.
Dryad is a digital repository of curated, open access scientific research. It is run by a not-for-profit membership organization that aims to "promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely reused to create knowledge." It is free to access, but note that there is a publishing charge associated if you wish to publish your data in Dryad.
Taking its name from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria, Zenodo is a tool that was "built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in open science." You can sort by keyword, title, journal, and more and download open access documents directly from the site.
Even if you’ve not used Google Scholar before, you’ll know Google. And, thus, you can probably guess that Google Scholar is a search engine dedicated to academic work. Not everything listed on Google Scholar will be freely available in full. But it is a good place to start if you’re looking for a specific paper, and many papers can be downloaded for free.
CORE is an open research aggregator. This means it works as a search engine for open access research published by organizations from around the world, all of which is available for free. It is also the world’s largest open access aggregator, so it is a very useful resource for researchers!
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database that lists around 12,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and the humanities.
PubMed is a search engine maintained by the NCBI, part of the United States National Library of Medicine. It provides access to more than 29 million citations of biomedical research from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. The NCBI runs a similar search engine for research in the chemical sciences called PubChem, too, which is also free to use.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a database for research from the social sciences and humanities, including 846,589 research papers from 426,107 researchers across 30 disciplines. Most of these are available for free, although you may need to sign up as a member (also free) to access some services.
Your gateway to world-class research journals
Edorium Journals is a publisher of high quality, international, peer reviewed, open access journals covering subjects in medical specialties, surgical specialties and basic sciences.