|
Articles |
| Websites (in
alphabetical order) |
Notes |
|
accessmylibrary.com/ |
Getting to view the
full text articles with this product is a matter of whether or not
some local library has granted you privileges. Do a search
for articles and then drill down to find out if you are eligible.
You might be pleasantly surprised. |
|
AgZines: A Harvest of
Free Agricultural Journals |
Free Agricultural
Journals of varying quality. Not centrally searchable. |
|
Archive.org |
Archive.org does have
some full text of articles and books. These things are
classified as being "texts"
(as opposed to all of the other media types). There is an
advanced
search, but since you cannot limit to "journals" or "books"
and there is no subject hierarchy, it is hard to tell what is
there very easily. |
|
BiomedCentral |
Publisher of more than
170 peer-reviewed open access journals; free registration
required. Has article level search. |
|
Crossengine.com |
|
Crossengine.com has a filter
for "pdf" for Google or
Yahoo in the basic
search mode: |
|
|
| Be
prepared to cruise though a lot of results pages until you get
a free article. |
|
| Directory of Open Access Journals |
The
article
level search does not search all of the journals listed. There
are a large number of third world journals. |
|
E-Scholarship:
|
The journal list on
this page gives you the listing of separate journals that are
included in the free access part of the California Digital
Library. The search form searches all of the CDL (I think) and
therefore some materials may be passworded and some may not be
articles. |
| ERIC (education and childhood
related
subjects) |
|
The
public ERIC database allows for searching for free full text
articles on their
advanced search page: |
|
|
| If you are looking
for journals, be sure to check
the "Show only results with free full text" AND the "journal
articles" filters. |
|
|
Fetch Database of
Free E-Journals |
Not updated since
2003. Use if desperate. |
| Findarticles.com |
Has article level
search. Articles are not in .pdf format, and tend to be
just the html (words but no graphics) versions. There are a
few scholarly journals included, but content is mostly popular
periodicals and newspapers. |
|
Free Full Text |
Browse by journal name
and then click down to contents. No keyword search. I
don't know when this site was last updated. |
| Freemedicaljournals.com |
Does not have article
level search; you have to look for a journal and then go to
that website and see if you can do an article level search. |
|
The Free Library by
Farlex |
You can find a wide
variety of journals here, and some of them appear to be quite up
to date. All the articles appear to be stripped of their
graphics (photos, pie charts, tables, etc.). |
Google
Yahoo Search |
| Use an ordinary Google or
Yahoo search: subject word(s)
filetype:pdf.
Thus: |
|
|
but be prepared to cruise though a
lot of results pages... Other things to try:
- "free article" subject
word(s)
- "free issue" subject
word(s)
In
Yahoo Search
click on "advanced" and then scroll down to "file format": |
|
|
|
|
Google News |
A source for newspaper
articles. Some articles, however, stop being freely available
after a certain time, or their URLs change.
Some single title newspaper sites
offer free registration so you can get the articles.
Google the name of the newspaper and see. Findarticles.com
also has a lot of newspaper articles. |
|
Google Scholar |
Google scholar does
have some free articles, but it is hard to tell what is an article
vs a book, report, website, etc., unless you are used to
recognizing bibliographic citations. Most of the time I get
offers to buy the item, rather than a free copy. Look for items
that come from .edu, .org, or .gov. |
|
Highwire Press
Free E-Journals |
You can do an article
level search, but results will include mostly non free items. But
you can still get some good articles. The "condensed" results
display (be sure to click on the SEARCH tab so you can click this
option) format allows you to identify the free stuff fast.
 |
|
Ideas |
"Welcome to the largest
bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely
on the Internet. Over 750'000 items of research can be browsed or
searched, and over 600'000 can be downloaded in full text! " |
|
LA 84 Foundation
|
Full text of older free full text
articles relating to sports, including a good selection of sport
history journals. |
| National
Science Digital Library |
From
Wikipedia: "The United States'
National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a free
online library for education and research in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics." (Italics mine). Clicking on the tab
"Higher Ed & Research" will refine your results to mostly journal
articles (removes some subject websites). |
|
Open J Gate |
This one is similar to
the Directory of Open Access Journals
(see above). You can limit to peer reviewed journals or to
Professional & Industry Journals. |
| Google Crossref
Search:
|
This version of Google
is supposed to search only the "free" journal content of certain
publishers, mostly in the sciences. It was a pilot project during
2004-2005, so I don't expect much in the way of really recent
stuff. The searching access point is in several publishers
websites, not in a stand alone Google search page. Use any of the
links on the left, as they all do the same thing. [more] |
| Pubmed Central |
Medical and related
areas. Has article level search. Click on the "Free" tab at
the top of the results list to limit to the free articles.
This not as comprehensive a search as a real
Medline search. |
|
Public Library of Science (PLOS) |
Peer reviewed
journals, mostly in medical topics |
|
OpenDOAR |
"OpenDOAR is pleased to present a trial
search service for the full-text of material held in open access
repositories listed in the
Directory."
In other words, free stuff, so it is like Google Scholar without
the sites that ask you to pay. But a repository can have all kinds
of different publications in it, not just journal articles. |
|
OAIstar |
OAIster is a union catalog (a combined catalog) of
digital resources. You can get some free articles here. But
it does also lead to items that require a subscription. |
|
PhysNet -
Physics Related free-access Journals |
Free full text journals on physics.
|
|
Pre Prints (and E-Prints) |
| Using Wikipedia to
find preprints |
Preprints are a way of disseminating
articles before they are published in the conventional way.
See the Wikipedia
article on preprints for more basic information and some
sources of searching for them. Note that preprints are
technically not the same as published journal articles and you may
be on shaky ground if you use them for an assignment. |
| Searching Google
for preprints |
You
could also
use an ordinary Google search:
- subject word(s) preprint.
- subject discipline word(s)
preprint.
Thus:
|
 |
| You
can also try the word "E-print" instead of preprint. |
|
|
Books |
| The nature
of the book marketplace makes for publishers who are a lot less
enthusiastic about giving stuff away for free than their journal
publishing counterparts. Most free books on the web are in
public domain, that is, either really old or unprofitable. Also,
most people find reading an entire book on a computer screen
difficult. |
|
|
You can search
inside books from A9.com, Google.com and MSN Live Search -
at the same time: however, this does not mean that you can read
all of the book this way. In some cases, there are public
domain items. |
|
Google |
Search the title of
the book you want. You might find a public domain copy of it
right away (but you probably won't). Also: try Google Scholar,
but see description above. |
| Yahoo! Search >
Electronic Literature Collections |
Lists of websites with
mostly public domain content. |
|
The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web
Resources |
Not really world
class, but maybe good enough for your purposes. These are mostly
ordinary free websites, usually used for reference purposes, with
few regular "books" included. |
|
Other |
|
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) |
Has
search page for
repositories. Campus digital
depositories or institutional repositories are final resting
places for freely available materials produced by a college
campus: they can be scholarly or not, articles, books, and almost
anything else. This is an emerging type of tool, and this website
is by no means a comprehensive search of them. A short list of
searchable sites can be found at the end of the Wikipedia article
on
institutional repository. |
|
Rutgers Alumni Databases |
A fairly extensive
collection of freely searchable databases. Be warned, however,
that most of these are bibliographic databases with few or no
links to full text. |
