Research Guides: Publicly Accessible Resources: Open Materials

Open courseware

California Learning Resource Network http://www.clrn.org

Curriki http://www.curriki.org

Saylor.org Academy http://www.saylor.org

Open source software

Presentation, spreadsheet, and word processing

Open Office

Libre Office

Computer code libraries

GitHub

Primary Source Sets

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets

Primary Source Sets are public domain materials curated to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee. Read about DPLA's education projects and contact DPLA with feedback at education@dp.la

Free databases

Biodiversity Heritage Library
BHL contains scanned, historic, biological literature from major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions: books, journals, and more. Content can be downloaded as PDF, ASCII, or just the images contained within the object. 1480-present.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends – more than any other science – upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity.
PubMed from NLM
Indexes citations, abstracts and full text from journal articles, case studies, conference papers, clinical trial reports, news reports, and reviews in the fields of medicine,nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and pre-clinical sciences. Full text available in HTML and PDF. You can limit to types of clinical queries, age, gender and species of subject, and review articles that summaries research on a topic. 1946-present.

PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.

PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A mobile version is available.
PubAg from the USDA
PubAg indexes citations and full-text of agricultural scientific literature. 1997-present.
PLANTS Database
The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. Fact Sheets provide brief descriptions of a plant, its uses, and cultural recommendations. Plant Guides are similar but more extensive. Both are provided as PDFs. The database also includes an image gallery of photos and line drawings of U.S. plants plus cultivated or foreign taxa.
Making of America from the University of Michigan
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. Content is available in text, GIF, and PDF formats. 1840-1900.

Digital libraries and repositories

Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDOAR

Registry of Open Access Repositories

Smithsonian Institution Digital Library

Perseus Digital Library (Greco-Roman literature, culture etc.)

Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
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A one stop shop for Open Access Journals (journals with a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access). Journals must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included. All subject areas are covered. Uses can search by journal title or browse titles. No searching of contents of journals is provided. Journals listed in the DOAJ will also be listed in our Journal Title Database.
JSTOR
JSTOR is an archive of journals from the humanities, social science, and sciences. It is not a comprehensive index of any of these subjects. Articles are available as PDFs back to volume one for most journals. While a select few journals include content from the current issue, most have a "rolling wall" that excludes content from the last several years of publication. Virginia Tech does not subscribe to every JSTOR package; some ejournals are not accessible through our subscription.

The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references. The content is expanded continuously with a current emphasis on international publications as well as pamphlets, images, and manuscripts from libraries, societies, and museums.

AGRICOLA from USDA

AGRICOLA serves as the public catalog of the National Agricultural Library. It contains records for all of the holdings of the Library. It also contains citations to articles, much like PubAg. AGRICOLA also contains citations to many items that, while valuable and relevant to the agricultural sciences, are not peer-reviewed journal articles. Also, AGRICOLA has a different interface. So, while there is some overlap between the two resources, they are different in significant ways.

BioMed Central

Hindawi Open Access Journals