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.
- Prepare the Excel sheet exactly as you want it to be laid out. There will be some formatting and font changes but make sure that it is as close as you want.
- Save the file normally, but then “save as .HTML” also.
- In Chrome (this is the easiest to use at the moment), open the .HTML version.
- Right click on the web page and select “View Frame Source”.
- Scroll down until you find the <table> command. Then highlight from this line to the </table> command. Use <ctrl>c to copy this code to the clipboard.
- Open the WordPress site, and page or post where the table is to appear. Navigate to the place where the table is to appear. Insert a “Custom HTML” block, and then <ctrl>v to paste the code into this space.
- Update your file and that’s it.
| 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. |