Online Resources

Google Books has more than 10 million free books available for users to read and download. Google’s free books are made available to read through careful consideration of and respect for copyright law globally. (image credit : google books/Future)

Open Library’s goal is to create a web page for every book ever published. This website is easy to navigate and has more than 1 million books in the archive. (image credit: openlibrary.org/Future)

Library of Congress

The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America. (image credit: Library of Congress/Future)

Founded in 1971, Project Gutenberg is the oldest eBook collection online. There are currently more than 56,000 eBooks to choose from, and they are free and easy to download. (image credit: Project Gutenberg/Future)

With over 75 million downloads of textbooks and business e-books every year, Bookboon is the largest publisher of e-books in the world.  They work with industry-leading experts and academics to create high-quality textbooks and business e-books. (image credit: Bookboon/Future)

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,074,535 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
(image credit: arxiv/Future)

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger.
(image credit: Food and Agriculture Organization/Future)

An extensive guide to health information resources. Includes common diseases and conditions, drug information, dictionaries, organizations, publications, directories, etc. (image credit: MedlinePlus/Future)

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). (image credit: PubMed Central/Future)

Browse WHO publications

The WHO Library is the world’s leading library on public health. It provides access to knowledge from WHO as well as to other sources of scientific literature produced around the world. WHO Library resources and expertise also provide scientific evidence and knowledge to low- and middle- income countries through a set of low-cost/high-use initiatives.

Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
Now offering 1034 open textbooks, the Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network. (image credit: Open Textbook Library/Future)

OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
(image credit: OAPEN/Future)

A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high-quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC Series. (image credit: BMC/Future)

IDEAS is the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely on the Internet. Based on RePEc, it indexes over 4,000,000 items of research, including over 3,600,000 that can be downloaded in full text. (image credit: IDEAS/Future)

CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics). Accessible, relevant, real-world economics teaching, available and free to everyone. Free online textbooks and resources for a new way of teaching and learning economics, using the best research to address the world’s most pressing problems. (image credit: CORE/Future)

Springer Open

SpringerOpen, launched in June 2010, includes Springer’s portfolio of 200+ peer-reviewed fully open access journals across all areas of science.  Their journals and books are made freely and permanently available online immediately upon publication. They are subject to high-level peer review, author, and production services ensuring the quality and reliability of the work. Authors publishing with SpringerOpen retains the copyright to their work, licensing it under a Creative Commons license. (image credit: SpringerOpen/Future)

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. (image credit: Google Scholar/Future)

The Globe eLibrary is both a web platform and mobile application that provides students and educators with free and quick access to digital storybooks and eLearning videos. It features age-appropriate and engaging educational resources tailored to children and young adults in the Philippines. Users can enjoy free access to hundreds of digital titles and video content through their mobile phones, tablet, laptop, and desktop computer. (image credit: Globe eLibrary/Future)

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.(image credit: Digital Commons Network/Future)

BENTHAM Open publishes a number of peer-reviewed, open access journals. These free-to-view online journals cover all major disciplines of science, medicine, technology and social sciences. BENTHAM Open provides researchers a platform to rapidly publish their research in a good-quality peer-reviewed journal. All peer-reviewed accepted submissions meeting high research and ethical standards are published with free access to all. (image credit: Bentham Open/Future)

Learning in 10 (LIT) Reviews is a collection of 10-minute, user-friendly video lectures covering topics at the level of the first clinical year in medical school. LIT Reviews can be used by all health professional students to quickly introduce themselves to important topics and supplement their in-class lecture materials. LIT Reviews have been created by world-class clinical faculty and each video undergoes a peer-review process to ensure accuracy of information. (image credit: Learning in 10 (LIT) Reviiews/Future)

PubChem is the world’s largest collection of freely accessible chemical information. Search chemicals by name, molecular formula, structure, and other identifiers. Find chemical and physical properties, biological activities, safety and toxicity information, patents, literature citations, and more.
(image credit: PubChem/Future)

PubMed comprises more than 34 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. (image credit: PubMed.gov /Future)

Thieme Open is the gateway to the Open Access journal content from the Thieme Group. It covers articles published under creative commons licenses in any of our journals (full OA journals and our hybrid/transformative journals). All Open Access content is available freely online for everyone, increasing the visibility, usage, and impact of your work.

7,800+ Open Access ebooks from 90 publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press, are now available at no cost to libraries or users. (image credit: JSTOR/Future)

The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.

ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast access to over 100 million structures, properties, and associated information. By integrating and linking compounds from hundreds of high-quality data sources, ChemSpider enables researchers to discover the most comprehensive view of freely available chemical data from a single online search. It is owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. (image credit: ChemSpider/Future)

Europe PMC provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It’s available to anyone, anywhere for free. With Europe PMC you can search and read 40.6 million publications, preprints, and other documents enriched with links to supporting data, reviews, protocols, and other relevant resources. (image credit: Europe PMC/Future)

Our World in Data was intended as a platform that brings this research together and makes it accessible and understandable. Our mission has always been to present the research and data we need to make progress against the world’s largest problems. (image credit: Our World in Data/Future)

In addition to e-books, Common Sense Education’s Digital Tools for School Libraries and Media Centers has a list that can help you (especially kids) sift through all the tech options out there to stay at the forefront of your craft and make your learning commons a central hub of information and culture in school.