Affordable Course Materials and Open Educational Resources (OER): Open Access

Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and many languages. The directory includes over 7,000 journals that is freely available online.

a division of Stanford University Libraries, is an ePublishing platform and partners with independent scholarly publishers, societies, associations, and university presses to facilitate the digital dissemination of 1465+ journals, reference works, books, and proceedings.

Ingentaconnect offers one of the most comprehensive collections of academic and professional research articles online.

SSRN is composed of specialized research networks/journals in the social sciences: Accounting, Economics, Financial Economics, Legal Scholarship, Management, Negotiations.

This database, from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, has more than 2 million open access, full-text studies that relate to public health and policy issues. The more general PubMed database contains more than 20 million articles, but some of them have restricted access. Both databases are worth searching.

This database is free to anyone, but access to the studies listed in your search results may be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Many scholars now post on their websites early PDF versions of their studies, and many of these will be listed. Google Scholar is where you’ll also have a chance to see findings in some scholarly books.

Microsoft Academic Search is a free service developed by Microsoft Research to help scholars, scientists, students, and practitioners quickly and easily find academic content, researchers, institutions, and activities. Microsoft Academic Search indexes not only millions of academic papers, it also surfaces key relationships between and among subjects, content, and authors in a manner that highlights the critical links that help define scientific research. Microsoft Academic Search makes it easy for you to direct your search experience in interesting and heretofore hidden directions with its suite of unique features and visualizations.

A searchable collection of reports.

A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars that produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics .

Anyone can visit Federal depository libraries and use the Federal documents collections, which are filled with information on careers, business opportunities, health and nutrition, laws and regulations, statistical data, demographics, consumer information, and numerous other subjects. Participating libraries can be located via http://catalog.gpo.gov/fdlpdir/FDLPdir.jsp.
GPO also disseminates a massive amount of Federal information online free of charge through the Federal Digital System (FDsys, at www.fdsys.gov). FDsys has approximately 380,000 Government documents available across 41 collections. Since launching the Web site in January 2009, has achieved more than 200 million retrievals.

is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides:

Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright
Fast publication times
Peer review by expert, practicing researchers
Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact
Community-based dialogue on articles
Worldwide media coverage