There follows a list of free and open access databases and academic tools. These are available to anyone at anytime and will be there for you even after you leave University. It is well worth acquainting yourself with these resources.
ACL Anthology [INFO]
The ACL Anthology currently hosts over 19,800 papers on the study of computational linguistics. The Anthology home page now features search connecting to the ACL Anthology Searchbench and ACL Author Network.
Arxiv [INFO]
arXiv is an openly accessible, moderated repository for
scholarly articles in specific scientific disciplines, including physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics. As an electronic archive, arXiv makes a commitment to provide persistent access to all announced submissions. arXiv is thus maintained with a focus on the perpetual availability of submissions.
Bibsonomy [INFO]
BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on the BibSonomy server, or tag post to retrieve it more easily. This is very similar to the bookmarks system that you use in your browser. Not only does BibSonomy allow you to access your bibliographical data from wherever you are, it allows you to share what you are reading with your friends, colleagues or the public at large.
BioMed Central [INFO]
BioMed Central makes freely and permanently available original research articles immediately upon publication. All research articles are rapidly and thoroughly peer-reviewed. Many BioMed Central journals are tracked by Thomson Reuters and all are referenced by Scopus and Google Scholar.
BioOne [INFO]
BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. BioOne explores economic models and strategic partnerships that balance the needs of all stakeholders, and currently demonstrates this balance by offering financially sustainable information services in the biological sciences. BioOne supports best practices that increase operational effectiveness and technological standards that integrate its content with a global network of scholarly exchange. Currently it has 11 open access journals, including material not currently searchable via either DOAJ or Open J-Gate.
CiteULike [INFO]
CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.
Clinical Trials [INFO]
ClinicalTrials.gov offers up-to-date information for locating federally and privately supported clinical trials for a wide range of diseases and conditions. A clinical trial (also clinical research) is a research study in human volunteers to answer specific health questions. Interventional trials determine whether experimental treatments or new ways of using known therapies are safe and effective under controlled environments. Observational trials address health issues in large groups of people or populations in natural settings.
Connotea [INFO]
Saving references in Connotea is quick and easy. You do it by saving a link to a web page for the reference, whether that be the PubMed entry, the publisher's PDF, or even an Amazon product page for a book. Connotea will, wherever possible, recognise the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you.
Directory of Open Access Journals [INFO]
Categorised, searchable links to free, full text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals. As of 25th March 2011, 538,679 articles were included in the DOAJ service.
EDINA [INFO]
EDINA is a UK national academic data centre, designated by JISC on behalf of UK funding bodies to support the activity of universities, colleges and research institutes in the UK, by delivering access to a range of online data services through a UK academic infrastructure, as well as supporting knowledge exchange and ICT capacity building, nationally and internationally, which innovates, generating knowledge, expertise and trust, through a focus on ease and continuity of access to scholarly resources and tools.
Espacenet - European Patent database [INFO]
Espacenet offers free access to more than 70 million patent documents worldwide, containing information about inventions and technical developments from 1836 to today.
GeNii [INFO]
The National Institute of Informatics (NII) is a provider of academic information services including CiNii for papers, theses, etc. (partially charged), Webcat Plus for books, magazines, etc. (free of charge), KAKEN for research subjects (free of charge), NII-DBR for specialised academic information (free of charge), JAIRO for research and educational content (free of charge). GeNii (pronounced "Jeanie") is the NII's academic content portal and will connect all of these services together.
Highwire [INFO]
As the leading ePublishing platform, HighWire Press partners with independent scholarly publishers, societies, associations, and university presses to facilitate the digital dissemination of 1530 journals, reference works, books, and proceedings. The users of HighWire hosted publications include researchers, clinicians, students, and other scholars seeking the best online research from a vast database of full-text scholarly, high-impact materials. The HighWire portal offers advanced searching and browsing capabilities and tools, creating an alternative means to find and make sense of information from over five million full-text articles; create keyword, citation or author alerts; and download citations across all the content HighWire hosts. In 2008, HighWire announced the creation of its new platform, H2O. This platform incorporates the information technology's best-practices, standards, and architecture, providing HighWire's partners the flexibility to provide their online visitors the latest features and best experience.
Hindawi Open Access Journals [INFO]
Founded in 1997, Hindawi Publishing Corporation is a commercial publisher of peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines, and publishes over 200 open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Ingenta [INFO]
IngentaConnect offers one of the most comprehensive collections of academic and professional research articles online, and citation data for some 4.5 million articles from 13,500 publications. Access to fulltext at this time is only available for open source resources.
Internet Engineering Task Force [INFO]
The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet. It is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet and is open to any interested individual.
Internet Scout Report [INFO]
The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators.
Intute [INFO]
Although scheduled no longer to be updated as of July 2011, Intute still offers an excellent guide to the best of web resources for particular areas of study. All web resources are reviewed and evaluated by academic specialists in the relevant fields before being included in the database. This is a particularly highly recommended resource for students and junior researchers.
Kaye & Laby's Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants (16th ed.) [INFO]
For many years, scientists working in a variety of fields, specialists, engineers and students have used Kaye and Laby as an invaluable reference for their work. At launch, this online version includes the entire, unedited contents of the 16th edition (published 1995) and is crammed full of tables of data, formulae, graphs and charts. This information span topics from fundamental constants to fibre optics, superconductivity to Raman spectroscopy and many others. The contents will be regularly reviewed and updated to reflect advances and developments in the fields of physics and chemistry.
Mathematics Subject Classification [INFO]
The Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) is an alphanumerical classification scheme produced by staff of and based on the coverage of two major mathematical reviews databases, Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH. It links up and aids searching of many mathematics and physics journals, which ask authors of research papers and expository articles to list subject codes from the Mathematics Subject Classification in their papers.
MathSciNet [INFO]
MathSciNet is an electronic publication offering access to a carefully maintained and easily searchable database of reviews, abstracts and bibliographic information for much of the mathematical sciences literature. Over 100,000 new items are added each year, most of them classified according to the Mathematics Subject Classification. Authors are uniquely identified, enabling a search for publications by individual author rather than by name string. Continuing in the tradition of the paper publication, Mathematical Reviews (MR), which was first published in 1940, expert reviewers are selected by a staff of professional mathematicians to write reviews of the current published literature; over 40,000 reviews are added to the database each year. Extending the MR tradition, MathSciNet contains over 2 million items and over 1 million direct links to original articles. Bibliographic data from retrodigitised articles dates back to the early 1800s. Reference lists are collected and matched internally from approximately 450 journals, and citation data for journals, authors, articles and reviews is provided. This web of citations allows users to track the history and influence of research publications in the mathematical sciences.
Metapress [INFO]
Metapress acts as the e-hosting facility for a range of academic journals, but is in itself an excellent place to start for finiding resources for study.
National Academies Press eBooks [INFO]
The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy. This collection contains over 4000 free ebooks.
NIST chemistry webbook [INFO]
This site provides thermochemical, thermophysical, and ion energetics data compiled by NIST under the Standard Reference Data Program
Open Depot [INFO]
The purpose of OpenDepot.org is to ensure that all academics worldwide can share in the benefits of making their research output Open Access. For those whose universities and organisations have an online repository, OpenDepot.org makes them easy to find. For those without a local repository, including unaffilitiated researchers, the OpenDepot is a place of deposit, available for others to harvest.
Open J-Gate [INFO]
A service by Informatics India dedicated to the promotion of the Open Access movement for scholarly journals.
Open Journal System [INFO]
Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research.
OpenDOAR [INFO]
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here.
Optics Infobase [INFO]
You can access a large collection of peer-reviewed optics and photonics content via OSA's digital library, Optics InfoBase. This cutting-edge repository includes all of OSA's content, and complements it with key co-publications. With more than 185,000 articles including conference papers from 310 conferences, OSA's content covers a breadth of disciplines, many of which are available free of charge in full text.
Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme [INFO]
The Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme® (PACS®) is a hierarchical subject classification scheme designed to classify and categorize the literature of physics and astronomy. PACS provides an essential tool for classification and efficient retrieval of literature in physics and astronomy; as such, PACS is used by AIP and other international publishers of journals in physics, astronomy, and related fields.
Public Library of Science [INFO]
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource.
PubMed [INFO]
PubMed comprises over 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.
Royal Society Publishing journals [INFO]
This site provides a range of services and facilities including access to the Society's journals, news of recently published science and the opportunity to purchase our publications online. Its list of international scientific journals includes the Philsophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665-present), the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication. Note that only a proportion of the Royal Society's journal content is available free only. For most journals there is a one or two year embargo and archive access goes back to either 2001 or 2004. The exception is Open Biology, an online, fully open access journal, which publishes articles covering biology at the molecular and cellular level.
Scribd [INFO]
Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing company. They make it easy to share and discover entertaining, informative and original written content across the web and mobile devices.
The National Bureau of Economic Research [INFO]
Founded in 1920, the National Bureau of Economic Research is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of how the economy works and to undertaking and disseminating economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community. Early research focused on the aggregate economy, examining in detail the business cycle and long-term economic growth. Simon Kuznets' pioneering work on national income accounting, Wesley Mitchell's influential study of the business cycle, and Milton Friedman's research on the demand for money and the determinants of consumer spending were among the early studies done at the NBER. Typifying its status as one of the United States' leading nonprofit economic research organisations, eighteen of the 33 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. On this site you will find a range of economic resources available free of charge in full text.
United States Patent database [INFO]
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the Federal agency for granting U.S. patents and registering trademarks.
World Bank Data Bank [INFO]
The World Bank's new site provides a huge library of data on worldwide development.
Zentralblatt Math [INFO]
Zentralblatt MATH (ZBMATH) is the world's most complete and longest running abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics. The ZBMATH database contains about 3 million bibliographic entries with reviews or abstracts drawn from more than 3500 journals and 1100 serials and covers the period from 1868 to present by the recent integration of the Jahrbuch database (JFM). Reviews are presently written by about 6,000 active experts from all over the world. The entries are classified according to the Mathematics Subject Classification Scheme (MSC 2010).