Open Access Databases

OpenDOAR: Search Open Repository Contents

• oaDOI
  "... if there's an open access version of the article, the oaDOI URL will send you there, instead of the paywalled article landing page."

• OpenDOAR: Search open repository contents
  "This service, based on the Google Custom Search engine, lets you search the contents of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR for freely available academic research information. This quality assured approach minimises (but does not eliminate!) spurious or junk results, and leads more directly to useful and relevant information. Full texts are available for most results."

Open Access Databases

These databases offer full or partial open access to content. 

• Paperity
  Multi-disciplinary aggregator of peer-reviewed Open Access journals and papers, "gold" and "hybrid".

• African Journals Online
  Promoting access to African research.

• Agricola (Agricultural Online Access)
  - 1979 to current
  - Over 1,900,000 citations

• AIDSinfo
  - access to U.S. resources on HIV/AIDS clinical research, treatment, prevention, drugs & vaccines, and medical practice guidelines

• Alexandria Digital Library Project: Gazetteer Development (Dictionary of Place Names)

• American Memory Collection -Library of Congress
  - provides access to some of LC collection, including a large quantity of digitized primary source material

• Archives Canada
  Search holdings of over 800 Canadian archives

• Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS)

• Arto (from National Library of Finland)
  - provides "free access to a searchable database of journal articles from over 600 scholarly journals published in Finland from 1990 onwards"
  - includes areas of the sciences, social sciences and humanities

• Bartleby.com Reference Works
  - includes a list of Reference texts e.g. Familiar Quotations, Roget's International Thesaurus, Bible (King James version), Anatomy of the Human Body (Gray's), Robert's Rules of Order, etc.

• BC Laws: Revised Statutes and Consolidated Regulations of British Columbia

• BC Legislative Library Newspaper Index

• BC Stats
  Access to freely available statistical publications from the province of BC. 

• Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences
  - brief biographies of deceased members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences

• Bioline International Journals
  Open access to peer reviewed bioscience journals published in developing countries. These journals contain timely research on public health, international development, tropical medicine, food and nutritional security and biodiversity.

• BioMed Central
  - provides over 203 peer reviewed open access journals in medicine and biology

• Bizjournals
  - includes local news, business stories throughout the U.S.

• Canadian Music Periodical Index (CMPI)
  Includes entries on articles dating from the late-19th century to the present day. Canadian music journals, newsletters and magazines are represented here, many of which are currently active

• CanLII
  Canadian Legal Information Institute: provides the full-text of legislation and court decisions for Canada and for each of the provinces, including Supreme Court of Canada decisions back to 1876.

• Catalog of U.S. Government Publications
  - from 1976 to present
  - indexes both print and electronic publications

• Chaucer Bibliography Online (Univ of Texas and Chaucer Society)
  - includes Chaucer studies from 1975 to the present

• ChEMBL Database
  Information on the properties and activities of drugs and drug-like small molecules and their targets. The database is part of the ChEMBL resources at the EMBL-EBI.

• Chemistry Central
  - publishes peer reviewed open access research in chemistry

• CIA : World Fact Book
  - current country profiles
  - includes history, people, government, economy, military, and industry

• Clinical Trials
  - "a registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world"

• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR)
  Database for systematic reviews in health care

• Cold Regions Bibliography (Library of Congress)
  - contains over 220,000 bibliographic records on Antarctica, cold regions science and technology

• Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
  - provides bibliographies for literature in computer science for journal articles, conferences, and technical papers

• Dictionary.com
  - access to several searchable dictionaries

• DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
  Peer reviewed articles in full text from a variety of disciplines

• EDGAR
  Full text filings for all North American public companies and mutual funds. Coverage is for the previous 4 years. Industry information is covered in the 10-k forms of individual companies.

• Educator's Reference Desk

• Energy Citations Database (U.S. Department of Energy)
  - provides free access to over 2.6 million science research citations with over 221,000 electronic documents, primarily from 1943 forward

• ERIC: Education Resources Center
  - 1966 to current
  - Some full text
  - Journal and non-journal resources

• Esp@cenet (European Patent Office)
  - provides searching of online patent information. See the Help Index for coverage and search fields

• First Nations Periodical Index (FNPI)
  Includes article citations from 20 newspapers, magazines & journals covering mainly Canadian content (no abstracts or full text)

• Free Medical Journals
  A service of AMEDEO, created to serve the needs of healthcare professionals, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, administrators, other members of the health professions, and patients and their friends. They can easily access timely, relevant information within their respective fields.

• FreeBMD
  FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records.

• Treesearch (USDA Forest Service)
  - records of Forest Service Research publications
  - includes some full text

• Geobase - (Canadian Council on Geomatics)
  - "to ensure the provision of, and access to, a common, up-to-date and maintained base of quality geospatial data for all of Canada"
  Note: This is a different resource than the VIU Library's database which is also called Geobase.

• Google News: Newspaper Archive Search
  - provides an easy way to search and explore historical archives for events, people, or ideas

• Google Scholar (VIU access)
  Searches link to VIU resources where applicable. Search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

• US Government Publishing Office
  - provides free access to important federal publications (official versions) e.g. Congressional Bills
  - see A-Z Resource List

• Hearth
  - electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics from 1850-1950 (full text)

• HighBeam Encyclopedia
  - search over 100 encylopedias and dictionaries

• Highwire Press (from Stanford University, U.S.)
  - over 15 million scientific and medical articles, including some full text

• Hoover's
  Brief company profiles, description, financial records, competition

• ibiblio (Univ of North Carolina)
  - an Internet collection of collections on all subject areas

• Index Translationum (UNESCO)
  - literature in translation
  - works can be searched in original language

• Information Bridge (US Department of Energy)
  - from 1995 to current
  - provides over 58,000 DOE research & development reports in full text in the sciences (physics, chemistry, materials biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer & information science, and renewable energy)

• Internet Archive
  "...digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public."

• Kew Bibliographic Databases (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
  - three searchable databases for botanical information: Taxonomic Information, Economic Botany, and Plant Micromorphology

• MagPortal
  - search for articles in free magazines e.g. cooking, sports

• Making of America (Cornell University)
  - "a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction"

• MedKnow Publications
  - academic and scientific biomedical journals published in India, including peer reviewed journals
  - provides lists for hospitals, physicians, prescription information, clinical trials, etc.

• MedLine Plus (U.S. National Library of Medicine))
  Medical information on over 740 topics, including systems of the body, compiled by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Includes diagrams and videos.

• Multicultural Canada
  - includes "newspapers, oral histories, photographs, books, newsletters, legal documents, meeting minutes and other ephemeral materials"

• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
  - archives of the U.S. government
  - provides online exhibits. historical & primary documents

• National Environmental Publications Internet Site (U.S.)
  - access to thousands of EPA documents, some in full text, some in citation

• NFB Images
  High Definition footage and archival treasures from the National Film Board of Canada and partners. "NFB IMAGES features images from around the world: classic and contemporary material on war and conflict, industrialization, rural and urban lifestyles, celebrities, wildlife and a treasure trove of film footage on the Arctic."

• NFB website.
  Online streaming of documentaries, animations, alternative dramas and interactive productions. Free for personal use.

• NLM - National Library of Medicine Gateway - U.S.
  Search multiple free databases related to medicine and health

• North American Ethnobotany (University of Michigan)
  - database of citations to articles about foods, drugs, dyes, and fibers derived from plants and used by Native American peoples

• OECD: Organisation for Economic and Co-Operative Development
  Statistics, publications and documents of the OECD related to sustainable economic growth, employment, living standards, financial stability, economic development, and world trade

• Online Books Page
  - lists over 25,000 free books by author, title, and subject along with options such as 'Banned Books Online,' Prize Winning Books,' etc.

• Our Roots
  Collection of digitized Canadian local histories in French and English, with learning packages for students and teachers.

• PLoS: Public Library of Science
  - "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource"

• Points to the Past: Gale Digital Archives (Free access within BC only)
  less...
  Includes:
  
  Gale Artemis: Primary Sources
  ... wide array of primary source material from the 17th, 18th & 19th centuries, including Indigenous Peoples: North America.
  
  Chatham House Online Archive
  ... publications and archives of the Royal Institute of International Affairs is a multi-disciplinary resource bringing a 20th and 21st century world perspective to researchers and students.
  
  Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive
  ... historical archive that embraces the scholarly study of slavery in a comprehensive, conceptual, and global way.
  
  State Papers Online, 1509-1714
  ... gathers together 16th- and 17th- century British State Papers and links these rare historical manuscripts to their fully text-searchable calendars.
  
  Gale NewsVault
  ... delivers single-point access to Gale’s ever-growing collection of historical newspapers and periodicals — currently more than 12 million digitized facsimile pages from newspapers and periodicals around the world.
  
  British Literary Manuscripts Online
  ... hundreds of thousands of pages of rare manuscripts, poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence, and other manuscripts from the year 1100 through the Victorian era.
  
  Declassified Documents Reference System
  ... provides direct information on the critical policies and events of post World War II era, including reports from Cabinet meeting minutes, National Security Council policy statements, CIA intelligence studies, presidential conferences, State Department political analyses, and Joint Chiefs' papers.

• Population Index
  - 1986-2000
  - Abstracts of demographic literature worldwide

• Project Gutenberg
  - free full text electronic book collection

• Public Domain Review
  A "curated collection" of material in the public domain. Includes articles, films, images, texts, and audio.

• PubMed

• PubMed Central
  U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature

• National Transportation Library (U.S.)
  - from 1960 to current
  - provides over 500,000 bibliogrpahic records concerning tranportation research published in books, journals, and reports

• Science Government
  - gateway to science information provided by U.S. government agencies

• SciELO: Scientific Electronic Library Online
  - scholarly literature in sciences, social sciences, arts & humanities published in open access journals from Latin American, Portugal, Spain and South Africa

• SciLit
  Database of open scientific & scholarly literature

• Scirus
  - "comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 410 million scientific items indexed at last count, it allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information"

• SEDAR
  - 1997 to current
  - Electronic filing system for the disclosure of securities documents for public companies and investment funds across Canada

• Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics (U.S.)
  - includes data for more than 100 sources on all aspects of criminal justice
  - includes over 600 data tables

• SPARC
  - open access research articles and databases

• Statistics Canada
  Census and various statistics for the Canadian population, including community profiles, GDP, unemployment, consumer price index, etc.

• Theses Canada Portal
  Search all theses in Library and Archives Canada's theses collection, which was established in 1965; and access and search the full text electronic versions of numerous Canadian theses and dissertations.

• US Census Bureau
  - the primary source for US Census records

• U.S. Democracy: Core Documents
  - direct online access to federal government documents e.g. Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Abraham Lincoln papers, USA Constitution, etc.

• USPTO Patent Database (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office)
  - allows searching of bibliographic information (e.g. titles, inventors, assignees, class codes, references)

• USPTO Trademark Database
  - allows searching of data (e.g. titles, owners, relevant dates) back to 1984

• Vintage Ad Browser
  100,000+ vintage advertisements to explore. Images in .jpg format.

• Waves - (Fisheries and Oceans Canada)
  - search the WAVES database for books, reports, government documents, theses, conference proceedings and journal titles

• Wikimedia Commons
  Database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

• World Development Indicators (& other World Bank databases)
  World Development Indicators by country, with tools for comparison and reporting; presented together with other databases on development topics.

• Open Parliament
  Independent, non-governmental site containing information on MPs, bills, debates, committees, and more.

• WorldCat
  Find items in libraries near you 

• Karnataka Public Digital Library