Free Scientific Research Resources on the Web  Tags: free science sciences scientific full-text  

Remember - if this symbol  appears next to an entry - everything in the site is free, full-text.

 CARL/ABRC OAI Harvester – Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Institutional Repositories Pilot Project Harvester.  This is a collection of openly-accessible full text research materials from Canadian Institutions.  Browse the Archives to see the collections covered or to select a collection to peruse. 

Free Resources Containing Searchable Abstracts in Science, Technology and Engineering – requires Microsoft Word to open – lists numerous research databases that are freely searchable.  Note that many do not offer free links to the full-text.

Google Scholar - enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.  Links to free full text when available.

INASP – International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.  Provides a good page of Resources & Publications, including research reports, books, and training materials.  Most provide links to free full-text, but some have links to book purchasing information.

 OAIster - a collection of freely available, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone.

 Public Library of Science – is non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

Science and Technology Sources on the Internet. There is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch: Freely Accessible Databases for the Public, by Sandy Lewis, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2001.

Science.gov - Each agency selects its best science information for science.gov. Two major types of information are included — selected authoritative science Web sites and often hard-to-access scientific databases (specific content varies by database). This gateway to government science information allows searches across 30 databases and more than 1,700 science Web sites.  Links to free full text when available.

ScienceResearch.com – launched in June of 2005, this is a free search engine that covers scientific journals and public science databases. Depending on the source, full text documents may be available.  In the event full text is not available, the results pull up an abstract of the article and a link to the source.

Scirus - currently covers over 167 million science-related Web pages, including: 58.5 million .edu sites, 18 million .org sites, 6.8 million .ac.uk sites, 18.6 million .com sites, 5 million .gov sites, Over 45 million other relevant sites from around the world. In addition to Web pages, Scirus indexes the following special sources: 14.6 million MEDLINE citations, 5.5 million ScienceDirect full-text articles, 1.2 million patents from the USPTO, 261,000 e-prints on ArXiv.org, 5,352 BioMed Central full-text articles, 10,600 NASA technical reports, 14,878 full text articles from Project Euclid, 56,000 full-text articles on Crystallography Journals Online, 230,000 full-text journal articles on Scitation.  Links to free full text when available.

 University of Wisconsin Digital Collections – contains books and journals about research conducted by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff; and unique or valuable titles held by the University of Wisconsin Libraries.  Particularly strong in Ecology and Natural Resources and the History of Science.

WorldWideScience - a global science gateway connecting to national and international scientific databases and portals.  Search results can take a bit of time to display - be patient.  Contains all of the content from Science.gov and Science Accelerator.  The U.S. publication links will lead to free full-text.  Publications from other countries vary on whether or not full-text is available.