This is an evolving list of open-access resources, hopefully, of interest to independent researchers. It’s based on a list that I accessed elsewhere, but all sites have been visited in the last two days, various corrections/updates made, and more significantly the descriptions have been added. The list is also uploaded to the FIRE-UK website.
Uploading an Excel spreadsheet is not as straightforward as it could be in WordPress. So here are the instructions for use when I update the list again.
| African Journals Online |
African Journals OnLine
(AJOL) is the world’s largest and preeminent platform of
African-published scholarly journals. |
| Amnesty International |
Nearly 30000
researched articles on human rights issues around the world. |
| Anthropological
Index Online |
The Royal
Anthropological Institute library holds some 4,000 periodical titles (1,500
current). Nearly 650 journals, published in more than 40 languages, are
indexed on a continuing basis. Records cover 1957 to the present. |
| Art UK |
Art UK is the
online home for every public art collection in the UK. |
| ARTE |
Every programme
with a cultural slant has a home on ARTE. About 56 % of the programmes are
documentaries, 19 % feature films, drama and series, 14 % news-related
programmes, while 5 % feature music and other performing arts. About two
thirds of the programmes broadcast on ARTE are previously unreleased. |
| ARTSTOR: Public
Collections |
Artstor’s Public
Collections offer 1.3 million freely accessible images, videos, documents,
and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and
institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open
access images from partner museums. |
| arXiv |
2,142,712
scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science,
quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical
engineering and systems science, and economics. |
| BAILII British and Irish Legal Information
Institute |
Based at the
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where you can find British and Irish
case law & legislation, European Union case law, Law Commission reports,
and other law-related British and Irish material. |
| BFI Player |
Shorts and
features, showing the best from the British Film Institute, national and
regional archives – including 120 years of Britain on film. |
| Bibliography
of Slavery and World Slaving |
A searchable
database of verified references to approximately 25,000 scholarly works on
slavery and slaving, worldwide and throughout human history, including modern
times. |
| Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (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 240
million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access
the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).
BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. |
| BioMed Central |
BMC has an
evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad
interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals
such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series. |
| Black Freedom Struggle in the United States |
Over 3000,
mainly ed-tech, articles. |
| BMC Nursing |
BMC Nursing is
an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on all aspects
of nursing research, training, education and practice. |
| British Council Film
Archive |
Rights-free
collection of over 100 short documentaries about wartime Britain, made by us
during the 1940s. |
| Cambridge Core Gold Open
Access Ebooks |
200+ open access
books from Cambridge University Press. |
| Campbell Systematic
Reviews |
The Campbell
Collaboration promotes positive social and economic change through the
production and use of systematic reviews and other evidence synthesis for
evidence-based policy and practice. |
| Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations |
The meaning of
abbreviations for English language legal publications, from the British
Isles, the Commonwealth and the United States, including those covering
international and comparative law. |
| Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts
1450–1700 |
Provides a
complete catalogue of literary manuscripts by 237 British authors of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It offers descriptions of more than
37,000 manuscript texts of poems, plays, discourses, translations, etc., as
well as notebooks, annotated printed books, corrected proofs, promptbooks,
letters, documents and other related manuscript materials, many hitherto
unrecorded, found in several hundred public and private collections
world-wide. |
| Choral Public Domain Library |
Currently hosts
free scores of at least 42972 choral and vocal works by at
least 4228 composers. |
| Cochrane |
A collection of
databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence
to inform healthcare decision-making. |
| CORE |
The world’s
largest collection of open access research papers (243 million items) |
| Curia (Court of Justice of the European Union) |
Cases and
opinion of the European Court of Justice |
| Databank |
From the World
Bank, an analysis and visualisation tool that contains collections of time
series data on a variety of topics. You can create your own queries; generate
tables, charts, and maps; and easily save, embed, and share them. |
| DERA (Digital Education Resource Archive) |
Based out of UCL
Institute of Education, a digital archive of documents published
electronically by government and other relevant bodies in the areas of
education, training, children and families. |
| DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books |
A
community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to over
60000 scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books |
| DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals |
Independent index
containing almost 17 500 peer-reviewed, open access
journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social
sciences, arts and humanities. |
| ECONBIZ |
Journals,
Working Papers & Conferences in Business Studies and Economics. |
| EThOS: eTheses Online Service |
600000 doctoral
theses |
| EUR-Lex |
Access to
European law |
| EUROPA |
Official website
of the European Union |
| European Court of Human Rights |
Website of the
European Court of Human Rights |
| Gender Forum: An internet journal for gender
studies |
As per the
title! |
| Getty – BHA and RILA |
Getty –
Répertoire international de la littérature de l’art (RILA) 1975-1989 and
Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) 1990-2007 – BHA and RILA cover
European and American visual arts material including articles from over 1,200
journals. These citation databases, searchable together, cover material
published between 1975 and 2007. |
| Google Scholar |
|
| GOV.UK |
The UK
Government website |
| GOV.UK (Publications) |
The UK
Government publications website |
| Hansard Parliamentary Debates |
The record of
proceedings in the UK Parliament |
| H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online |
H-Net is an
international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers
dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet
and the World Wide Web. |
| IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library |
207,405 works ·
25,839 composers · 1,584 performers · 678,191 scores · 12,968,897+ pages ·
75,488 recordings |
| Independent Voices: An
Open Access Collection of an Alternative Press |
Alternative
press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections
of participating libraries during the latter half of the 20th century. |
| Index of Medieval Art |
Online holdings
that complement, and partly overlap with, the print Index at Princeton
University currently being integrated into the database. The collections
include images and descriptive data related to the iconography of works of
art produced between late Antiquity and the sixteenth century. |
| Internet Archive Scholar |
Fulltext search
index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly
documents preserved in the Internet Archive, from digitized copies of
eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference
proceedings and pre-prints. |
| JISC Library Hub Discover |
Giving you
access to details of materials held in many UK national, academic and
specialist libraries, Library Hub Discover currently contains 50,406,132
records created from 140,231,141 records contributed by 189 institutions. |
| JSTOR: Open Content |
Millions of
articles from 2000 journals, thousands of open access ebooks, and 34000
research reports, plus various catalogues and alert systems. |
| Law Commission |
The statutory
independent body created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 to keep the law of
England and Wales under review and to recommend reform where it is needed. |
| Lawbore |
Highlights the
best law-related sites for undergraduates, hand-selected by lecturers at the
City Law School, University of London. |
| Legacies of British Slave-ownership |
The Centre for
the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London
(UCL) has extensive databases, maps, and ownership details for plantations
and more. |
| Legislation.gov.uk (UK Legislation) |
Details of all
UK legislation that has received Royal Assent. |
| London Lives 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and
Social Policy in the Metropolis |
A fully
searchable edition of 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen
datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names. |
| Moving Image Archive |
Nine million
movies, films, and vidoes. |
| Mutopia Project |
2117 pieces of
music. |
| OAIster |
The parent of
WorldCat – a database of over 50M items through the colaboration of libraries
and librarians around the world. |
| OER Commons |
OER Commons is a
public digital library of open educational resources. |
| OER Open Textbooks |
California-based
NFP providing open access materials for education |
| Open Access Digital Theological Library |
200k books, 10M
articles, 6.5k journals – all of interest to theologians. |
| OpenLearn |
Over 1000 free
courses and other learning materials. |
| Oxford University Press
Open Access |
Open access (OA)
is a key part of how Oxford University Press (OUP) supports our mission to
achieve the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. |
| PEDro |
Based in
Australia, over 56,000 trials, reviews and guidelines evaluating
physiotherapy interventions. |
| Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 |
The largest body
of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing
197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court. |
| Project Gutenberg |
Where it all
began: a library of over 60,000 free eBooks |
| PsychOpen |
European
database of open access material, operated by the Leibniz Institute for
Psychology (ZPID), publishing primary research in the field of
psychology. |
| PubMed |
From the US
National Library of Medicine, more than 34 million citations for biomedical
literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. |
| Queer/Disrupt Archives
(Open Access Resources) |
** NO LONGER
AVAILABLE – IF SOMEONE HAS AN ALTERNATIVE LINK PLEASE FORWARD IT ** |
| Radio Times 1923-2009 |
Discover 10,447,828 listings
and 250,476 playable programmes from the BBC |
| Reading Experience
Database (UK RED), 1450–1945 |
UK RED captures
the reading tastes and habits of the famous and the ordinary, the young and
the old, men and women. The texts range from books and newspapers to ephemera
such as playbills and tickets, and from illuminated manuscripts, novels and
poetry to tombstone inscriptions and graffiti. |
| ROAR: Registry of Open Access Repositories |
Based out of the
University of Southampton, UK – a database of repositories supporting open
access. |
| Royal Shakespeare Company
Image Library |
A selection from
their archives. |
| Slave Voyages (Open Access Resources) |
Collaborative
digital initiative of publicly accessible records of forced relocations of
more than 12 million African slaves. I ncludes the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database. |
| Social Care Online |
The UK’s largest
database of information and research on all aspects of social care and social
work. |
| Springer Open Access
eBooks |
Over 2000 open
access books are available. |
| Supreme Court |
The final court
of appeal in the UK for civil cases, and for criminal cases from England,
Wales and Northern Ireland. The Supreme Court hears cases of the greatest
public or constitutional importance affecting the whole population. |
| Taylor & Francis Open
Access eBooks |
Nearly 2000
T&F books are available as Open Access resources. |
| The First World War Poetry Digital Archive |
Over 7,000 items
of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. |
| The Open Library of Humanities |
From Birkbeck,
University of London, dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no
author-facing article processing charges. |
| Trip |
High quality
clinical research evidence. |
| UK
Data Service |
Trusted access
and training to use the UK’s largest collection of economic, social and
population data for research and teaching |
| UK Parliament |
Official website
of the UK parliament |
| UNESCO
Core Data Portal |
Public access to
information is a key component of UNESCO’s commitment to transparency and its
accountability. This portal provides information and reports about the work
done by UNESCO. |
| US
Library of Congress Digital Collections – Overview |
US Library of
Congress digital collections |
| VADS |
Over 140k images
from over 300 art and design collections in the UK. |
| Virtual Laboratory |
The Virtual
Laboratory is a platform where historians publish and discuss their research
on experimentation in the life sciences, art, and technology. The Virtual
Laboratory collects and presents texts and images concerning various aspects
of the experimentalization of life, such as instruments, experiments, sites
and people. |
| Vision of Britain through Time |
University of
Portsmouth – UK local history sources |
| Wiley
Online Library Open Access |
|
| Women Working, 1800-1930 |
An exploration
of women’s impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and
the Great Depression. |
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