Open Access (Free) Books, Journals and Textbooks

Open access databases provide free access to academic scholarly articles, journals, and textbooks. The purpose is to increase scholarly communication and to provide resources at ‘no extra cost’ to students. These are reliable sources of information, and the articles can be used in class papers or research.

  • BC Open Collection by BC Campus
    • BE Campus is housed out of the University of British Columbia in Canada.  Subjects include Academic Career Success, Adult Basic Education, Business, Health/Medicine, Sciences, Social Sciences and Language learning.
  • BioMed Central 

    • BioMed Central publishes 244 peer reviewed open access journals in Education, Health/Medicine, Mathematics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sciences and Social Sciences.

  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 
    • DOAJ has over 32,300+ journals with 8.7 + million articles from 131 countries and representing 80 different languages that covers on a broad range of subjects
  • ERIC
    • Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) database, is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. Database includes journal articles, books, reports, guides, test, questionnaires etc. and covers all levels of education, K-12, Higher Education and Adult Education.
  • Hindawi
    • 200 + open access academic journals with a focus on the sciences: medical, physical, biological, mathematics, engineering, and computer sciences.
  • Libre Texts 
    • Libre Texts is a joint project from California State University, UC Davis, Department of Education, National Science Foundation, and Textbook Pilot Project. Open Access text are also available in Espanol.  Subjects include Sciences, Business, Humanities, Medicine, Social Sciences and Statistics.
  • MedLine Plus 
    • An online health information resource from the National Institute of Health for patients, families, and friends.  Includes: Health Topics, Drugs & Supplements, Medical Encyclopedia, Medical Test, Genetics and Health Recipes. Includes health information in multiple languages and uses easy-to-read health information.   
  • Milne Open Textbooks 
    • Created and maintained by SUNY on a variety of different subjects.  Format available in HTML, PDF or ePUB.
  • OAIster 
    • Open Access Index contains digital resources from open archives collections representing multidisciplinary resources from 1000+ contributors worldwide. Includes digitized books and articles, audio files, images, theses, technical reports, research papers and image collections.
  • OAPEN Library 
    • OAPEN is supported by European Research Council and several other European entities, includes OA Textbooks published in United States.  Format is PDF.
  • OER Commons 
    • Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). This database contains a variety of subjects from K-12 through college.  This is not limited to textbooks but includes material types such as: activity/labs, lectures, lesson plans, etc.  It has one of the better search limiters to assist you in drilling down to specifics.
  • OMICS 
    • Group Over 700 open access journal titles, 13,000+ articles primarily in the medical and science disciplines but does include journals on: business/ management, economics/accounting and social/political sciences.
  • Open Access Digital Theological Library
    • The mission of Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) is to curate high-quality content in religious studies and related disciplines from publisher websites, institutional repositories, scholarly societies, archives and stable public domain collections.
  • Open Textbook Library 
    • Center for Open Education at University of Minnesota. This site displays only textbooks that are “open license.” Subject range from the humanities/social science, education, natural sciences and medicine. Also offers access to books in a variety of formats: online, PDF, ePUB, Word and XML.
  • OpenStax 
    • OpenStax based at Rice University, Since 2012 OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com. Textbooks available in English and in Spanish.  Subjects include Business, College Success, Humanities, Math, Science, Social Science.
  • ​​​​​PLoS One 
    • Public Library of Science (PLoS) One searches 11 peer reviewed scientific journals including biology, health/medicine, climate, and sustainability.
  • Pressbook Directory 
    • Over 5000+ books, includes filters on license, subjects, language, and others to help you narrow down your search results.
  • PubMed Central 
    • PubMed is from the National Institute of Health National Library of Medicine and has more than 8+ million articles.
  • WorldCat 
    • This online catalog searches libraries around the world to locate books and other resources. Search for the topic you want. Results will show a list of titles with options on the left side of the list. Select the Open Access option to display titles that are free to use.