Below are a variety of free databases that include a range of research, media, information, reports, and public records that you can use for your research.
Digital Public Library of America Brings together the collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a growing collection of more than 44,000 online, open access scholarly books. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
Open Textbook Library Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost..
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Date coverage varies. Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages. There are more than 16,000 journals and 6.5 million article records in the directory.
Internet Archive: This website provides both a rich database of books, images, music, video, video games, software, and other digital artifacts that are largely in the public domain and free to use and incorporate into one's work. The site also includes the Wayback Machine which allows you to look at the history of a website as far back as 2000.
Internet Archive Scholar: This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
Public Library of Science (PLoS): Focusing on a specific area within life and health science, run by leading academics and practicing researchers and publish significant new research in their respective fields, along with commentary and review.
PubMed Central: U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
SSRN: SSRN, formerly known as Social Science Research Network, is an open access research platform used to share early-stage research, evolve ideas, measure results, and connect scholars around the world. From submission to distribution, the potential is there for your research to reach millions of SSRN viewers and subscribers around the world.
Art Institute of Chicago: More than 50,000 images of works in the collection
Belvedere, Vienna: Roughly half of an 18,600-strong collection, including the world-famous group of works by Klimt and Schiele
Birmingham Museums Trust: Nearly 2,500 images from across the eight municipal collections looked after by the trust. More are gradually being added.
Cleveland Art Museum: 30,000 works from the collection
Harvard Art Museums: More than 200,000 images available from the university’s collections of 250,000 objects
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: More than 100,000 images from the museum and the Getty Research Center archives
Kunstmuseum Basel: More than 4,100 photographs of works in the public domain
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: Millions of images from the national archives
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Nearly 20,000 images from the collections
Mauritshuis, The Hague: The full collection of more than 800 works, mainly by Dutch and Flemish masters
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: More than 400,000 images
Minneapolis Institute of Art: Access to more than 50,000 works
Munch Museet, Norway: One of the world’s largest single-artist collections: 1,150 paintings and some 18,000 prints, free to download
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington: Around 30,000 images from New Zealand’s state collections
Národní galerie Praha: The Czech Republic’s national collections in Prague
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: More than 51,000 works in the public domain
Nationalmuseet Danmark: More than 50,000 images from 20 institutions across Denmark
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: 6,000 images – most of the collection – via Wikimedia Commons
New York Public Library: 180,000 items, free to share and reuse
Paris Musées: 320,000 images from 14 Parisian institutions, including the Petit Palais and the Catacombs
Pinakotheken, Munich: More than 10,000 works from the Bavarian State Paintings Collections – free to download and reuse
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 360,000 images – more than a third of the collection
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. : As of 26 February 2020, 2.8m digitised images from across the Smithsonian’s multiple museums, research centres, libraries and archives are freely available online.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich: Full access to out-of-copyright works. Strong on Munich-based painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen: Around 15,000 works (of a quarter of a million) have been photographed in hi-res, with all public domain images free to download and use
Wellcome Collection, London: Thousands of archival images from the science collections at the museum and library
Yale University: Some 250,000 images from the university collections, including the Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art
Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR): By Congressional mandate, ATSDR produces "toxicological profiles" for hazardous substances found at National Priorities List (NPL) sites. These hazardous substances are ranked based on frequency of occurrence at NPL sites, toxicity, and potential for human exposure. Toxicological profiles are developed from a priority list of 275 substances. ATSDR also prepares toxicological profiles for the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) on substances related to federal sites.
American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Library: Includes access to the museum's science publications and archives, museum publications and digital special collections, and archive authority records.
ArchiveGrid contains nearly 2 million archival material descriptions for collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. Includes information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other items. Contact information for the institutions where the collections are kept is provided.
arXiv.org: Date coverage varies. Open access to over 1/2 million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Statistics, and Quantitative Finance.
BioMedCentral Open Access: Date coverage varies. Fulltext. Subjects covered include ecology, microbiology, genetics, biochemistry and medicine.
CAIRN Free Access Journals: CAIRN Free Access Journals is a database of journals in the humanities and social sciences. Journals are freely available online once the embargo period defined by their publisher is over. Most of the titles in the database are French language journals.
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP): The CGP is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general key word. Advanced searching is also available.
Census Data: This database supersedes American Fact Finder. The new database includes American Community Survey; 1-year Selected Population Profiles 2010-2015; 5-year Selected Population Tables 2011-2015; 5-Year American Indian; Alaska Native Population Profiles; 2000 and 2010 Decennial Summary and Redistricting Data Summary Files.
Center for Disease Control and Prevention Publications: 1982-present. Includes Emerging Infectious Diseases, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Preventing Chronic Disease and numerous other publications arranged by topic.
ChemRxiv: ChemRxiv (pronounced "chem-archive") is a free online submission, distribution, and archival service for unpublished preprints in chemistry and related areas. ChemRxiv is operated by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit and the world's largest scientific society, in collaboration with partners.
ChemSpider: ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast text and structure search access to over 67 million structures from hundreds of data sources.
Clinical Guidelines Program: 2000-present. Includes major clinical guidelines for adult and pediatric populations, quality of care indicator tools, clinical education program descriptions.
ClinicalTrials.gov: Provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, ClinicalTrials.gov is a database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world.
Comparative Effectiveness Research (NLM): Specialized searches of published research and research in progress to help inform investigations of comparative effectiveness.
Congress.gov: Congress.gov is the official source for federal legislative information. It replaces the nearly 20-year-old THOMAS.gov site. The site includes materials on current and past legislation, the Daily Digest version of the Congressional Record, links to Congessional committees, their hearings and reports (1995-present) and an explanation of the Legislative Process.
Congressional Member Guide: Provides access to information on current members of Congress, including their picture, party affiliation, hometown, home state, and length of service.
Congressional Record (1994-2011): Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. Published daily when Congress is in session. GPO Access contains Congressional Record volumes from 140 (1994) to the present. At the back of each daily issue is the "Daily Digest," which summarizes the day's floor and committee activities. The current year's Congressional Record database is usually updated daily by 11 a.m., except when a late adjournment delays production of the issue.
DailyMed: DailyMed provides trustworthy information about marketed drugs in the United States. DailyMed is the official provider of FDA label information (package inserts). This Web site provides a standard, comprehensive, up-to-date, look-up and download resource of medication content and labeling found in medication package inserts. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides this free database.
Darwin's Manuscripts: The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) offers online access to Charles Darwin's surviving 46,032 pages of scientific manuscripts—his original notes, notebooks, and drafts—that contain the crucial documentary evidence for the birth and maturation of his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The site contains all Darwin’s botany and zoology manuscripts and embraces all those on human evolution.
Digital Public Library of America Brings together the collections of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a growing collection of more than 44,000 online, open access scholarly books. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Date coverage varies. Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages. There are more than 16,000 journals and 6.5 million article records in the directory.
Drug Information Portal: Quick access to quality drug information from NIH and the National Library of Medicine.
Eduref.org: Dates vary. Includes over 2,000 lesson plans and other resources and services to the education community. From the Information Institute of Syracuse.
Free Medical Journals: The Free Medical Journals database provides unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. Some of the featured journals include the New England Journal of Medicine, British Medicine Journal, Brain: a Journal of Neurology, and Clinical Infectious Diseases.
Free Medical Journals (GFMER): The Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research is a database supported by the Republic and Canton of Geneva, the Department of Social Affairs of the City of Geneva and other Swiss and international institutions.
Gallica: Gallica digital library from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Over a million documents accessible for free : Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Images, Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals, Sound records, Music, Scores, etc.
Gutenberg-e is an open access ebook site. These award winning monographs, coordinated with the American Historical Association, afford emerging scholars new possibilities for online publications, weaving traditional narrative with digitized primary sources, including maps, photographs, and oral histories.
HathiTrust Digital Library includes over 8 million digitized items, including more than 2 million public domain books available for free. HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries.
Hindawi Publishing Open Access: Hindawi publishes the Science Citation Index, Scopus, PubMed, INSPEC, Mathematical Reviews, and Chemical Abstracts.
Internet Archive: This website provides both a rich database of books, images, music, video, video games, software, and other digital artifacts that are largely in the public domain and free to use and incorporate into one's work. The site also includes the Wayback Machine which allows you to look at the history of a website as far back as 2000.
Internet Archive Scholar: This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
Invisible Institute - Citizens Police Data Project: Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP) takes records of police interactions with the public – records that would otherwise be buried in internal databases – and opens them up to make the data useful to the public, creating a permanent record for every CPD police officer.
Library of Congress Digital Collections: A database of digital artifacts available to the public from the U.S. Library of Congress.
LILACS: LILACS is the most important and comprehensive index of scientific and technical literature of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mayo Clinic: MayoClinic's web site offers health information to help users assess symptoms, understand their diagnosis and manage their health. Search by symptom, procedure, disease or condition.This site is produced by a team of Mayo Clinic experts.
MedlinePlus Health Information: MedlinePlus has extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 800 diseases and conditions. There are directories, a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary, easy-to-understand tutorials on common conditions, tests, and treatments, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials. MedlinePlus is updated daily.
MERLOT II: A curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): NARA has preserved and provided access to the records of the United States of America for more than seven decades. Records help us claim our rights and entitlements, hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, & document our history as a nation. In short, NARA ensures continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their Government. NARA is the keeper of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
NOAA Central Library: Includes materials from Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (Miami), National Hurricane Center/Tropical Prediction Center (Miami), Western Regional Center (Seattle), and Camp Springs (Maryland)
NTIS: 1964-present. Citations and abstracts. The National Technical Information Service catalog covers: business and management studies, health and safety reports, environmental research reports and site clean-up, technology innovations, international market reports, and training tools and materials.
National Transportation Library (U.S.): A government database that covers from 1960 to the present and provides over 500,000 bibliographic records concerning transportation research published in books, journals, and reports.
OAIster: OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster includes more than 30 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,500 contributors.
Open Access Theses & Dissertations: OATD currently indexes more than 2,000,000 theses and dissertations.
OpenDOAR: 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. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.
Orange Book (FDA): US Food & Drug Administration database of approved drug products with therapeutic equivalence evaluations. Providing timely consumer information on generic drugs, the Electronic Orange Book is updated daily as new generic approvals occur.
OSF Preprints: The Open Science Framework preprints discover service includes research and scholarship in many disciplines.
Paperity: A multi-disciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers, "gold" and "hybrid"
Petrucci Music Library This link opens in a new window: The free public domain sheet music library. A virtual library containing all public domain music scores as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.
PILOTS (Published International Literature on Traumatic Stress): 1995-present. An index to the worldwide literature on post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health consequences of exposure to traumatic events produced by the National Center for PTSD.
PubChem: Contains information on the biological activity of small molecules.
Public Health Image Library (PHIL): 2005-present. An organized, universal electronic gateway to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pictures organized into hierarchical categories of people, places, and science presented as single images, image sets, and multimedia files.
Public Library of Science (PLoS): Focusing on a specific area within life and health science, run by leading academics and practicing researchers and publish significant new research in their respective fields, along with commentary and review.
PubMed Central: U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Revistas Cientificas Del CSIC Free Journals: Revistas Cientificas Del CSIC Free Journals is a database featuring journals in Science and Technology, Arts and Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Science.gov: 2002-present. Site searches over 36 databases and 1,850 selected websites, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information, including research and development results.
Society of American Archivists Publications: The American Archivist is the best publication of its kind in the archives field going back 260 issues to 1938. The journal seeks to reflect thinking about theoretical and practical developments in the archival profession, particularly in North America; about the relationships between archivists and the creators and users of archives; and about cultural, social, legal, and technological developments that affect the nature of recorded information and the need to create and maintain it.
SpringerOpen: The SpringerOpen database includes Springer’s portfolio of 160+ peer-reviewed fully open access journals across all areas of science ranging from very specialized titles to SpringerPlus; interdisciplinary open access journal that covers all disciplines.
SSRN: SSRN, formerly known as Social Science Research Network, is an open access research platform used to share early-stage research, evolve ideas, measure results, and connect scholars around the world. From submission to distribution, the potential is there for your research to reach millions of SSRN viewers and subscribers around the world.
Transportation Research Board (TRB) Publications Index: The TRB Publications Index contains over 50,000 papers, articles, and reports published by the Transportation Research Board, Highway Research Board, Strategic Highway Research Program, or the Marine Board from 1923 to date.
U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA): Medical product safety information, adverse event/problem reporting and more.
U.S. Bilateral Relations Fact Sheets: U.S. Dept of State site provides publications that include facts about the land, people, history, government, political conditions, economy, and foreign relations of independent states, some dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty. The Background Notes are updated/revised by the Office of Electronic Information and Publications of the Bureau of Public Affairs as they are received from the Department's regional bureaus.
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE): Office of Scientific and Technical Information: 1994-present. Free public access to full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy (DOE) research report literature. Topics include physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and others of interest related to DOE's mission.
U.S. Government Documents: Dates vary from early and mid 1990's. Full text. The primary source for free, online, published, official and authenticated government information. Includes Congressional bills, budget, documents, prints, and reports, hearings, the Congressional Record, the Constitution, the Federal Register, the United States Code, Presidential Documents, Public and Private Laws, United States Code and Statutes at Large. Links to the CGP (Catalog of Government Publications), news, offices of the Inspector General, Congressional Relations, and more.
USPTO Patent Database (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office): This database allows searching of bibliographic information (e.g. titles, inventors, assignees, class codes, references) relating to patents
USPTO Trademark Database: This database allows searching of data (e.g. titles, owners, relevant dates) of trademarks back to 1984.
United Nations Official Document System: United Nations Official Document System database covers official United Nations documentation, beginning in 1993. ODS also provides access to the resolutions of the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council from 1946 onwards
Wikimedia Commons: Database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
zbMATH: Zentralblatt MATH database contains more than 3 million bibliographic entries with reviews or abstracts currently drawn from more than 3,000 journals and serials, and 170,000 books. The coverage starts in 1826 and is complete from 1868 to the present.
Borrowed and adapted from Stony Brook University Libraries LibGuide.