Open Web Resources
While our Online Databases are great for finding articles (check your own library website if you aren’t from SCSU), they aren’t the only resources out there. There are a large number of open web, free-for-reading resources that are still high quality. Open Access sites are resources that are free to read, but may have costs for publishing. It’s essentially a business model, and is not incompatible with peer-review or other editorial standards that ensure high quality materials. Other sites may specialize in public domain works (works that have expired copyrights or were otherwise released from copyright restrictions and can be freely copied). Still others may allow free reading of certain materials but not others, using the free material essentially as advertising. I use the phrase “Open Web” to describe anything that does not require a password or membership to access, as a contrast to subscription databases, which you can only access on campus or via a login.
I’ll highlight a few sites for open web materials that are particularly good for academic work. There is a lot of junk on the web, but there are also a lot of very good resources.
Books
Yes, indeed, there are books on the Internet. Most of them are public domain works that have expired copyrights. The most comprehensive site that I am aware of for English Language materials is the Online Books Page from U. Penn. They have links to thousands of classics, from Ancient Greece, to Shakespeare, to materials from the early 1900’s (current US copyright automatically runs out in the early 1920’s, so most of the materials were published before then). You can search by Author, Title, or Subject (just like a library catalog).
The Online Books Page also links to collections of digitized Serials (journals/magazines).
The other two large collections of online books are the Internet Archive’s Text Archive, and Project Gutenberg.
Journals
Finding journal articles is the most common research task for university students. Once you’ve exhausted the library databases, there are several prime sites for finding free online articles. (These are also handy when you are having password problems with a library system!)
The Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/) is one of the best resources, because they specialize in peer review journals. Peer Review is the editorial process in which experts in the field review articles before publication. There are journals listed in nearly every academic and professional discipline. About a quarter of the journals are searchable at the article level (titles and abstracts, when available) but not all. For those that aren’t, you must go to the journal home page and either review tables of contents, or use the journal’s local search functions, if available.
The DOAJ also includes the BioMed and PubMed Central journals, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (US).
A separate database is the Highwire Press Archive (http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl). This is not considered Open Access, because Highwire only allows free access to backissues, usually after about a year. However, several years of mostly science and medical journals are available, representing over a million free articles.
Highwire considers itself the largest archive of free fulltext articles, but also lists the other major science archives, including the NASA Astrophysics Data System, and arXiv (physics, mathematics, and computer science).
The sciences have the largest archives and more of them. The social sciences, specifically education, do have the free web version of ERIC (also available as a library database), which includes full text of ERIC Documents (reports, conference papers, etc.) from the early 1990’s to the present. Most journal articles in the open version of ERIC will not have full text links, so you may prefer to search the library database version.
FindArticles (http://www.findarticles.com/) is a multi-subject index to a mix of free full text and pay-per-use articles. You can limit your search to the free articles, and/or take advantage of the many trial offers available for the pay-per-use subscriptions. Always check your library for full text access before you pay for anything!
Other resources
There are other archives that don’t fit strictly into either books or journal articles, though they may include some of each. The largest one is Oaister (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/), which searches a number of institutional archives for articles, conference presentations, theses and dissertations, reports, and other documents.
For more archives and resource collections see my Open Access Guides, and the collections at The Web Library, and the eGranary.
