Mining OA
Use these tools to find free full text scholarly information.
OAIster
OAIster is an Open Archives Inititiative union catalog of digital resources
which harvests from many of the other sources and therefore is an excellent all-inclusive search tool. OAIster added
its 10 millionth record in January 2007. Both freely available and restricted access resources are included,
however.
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals.
This service aims to cover all subjects in free, full text quality controlled scholarly journals (2,670 as of 05/2007).
It can be used to find articles by keyword or author.
OpenDOAR The Directory of Open Access Repositories.
Repository contents can be searched.
Google Scholar
This free resource, which sometimes succeeds where expensive databases fail, wears a disclaimer that it is not related to
SciFinder Scholar (a very expensive database) provided by the American Chemical Society. Google was sued by the ACS for
calling its service Google Scholar. Google and Google Scholar boost the worldwide visibility and accessibility of scholarly
content and work with publishers to make their content searchable, accessibility beyond abstracts which are required being
determined by the publisher.
Google Books
Google books are from 2 sources: publishers and libraries. If Google has permission the book is full view. In other cases,
there is limited preview, snippet view or no preview available but possibly with links to help you find it in a bookstore or
library.
Google
A search on author last name and title key words may yield a PDF from the author's website or elsewhere.
Gallica
Gallica is the electronic resource of the Bibliotheque nationale de France and thus requires some knowledge of French to access the
90,000 digitized works many of which are in English and other languages as well as French. Most full-text is image-based but some
books are in text files.
Click on the Recherche tab and search by author (Auteur), keywords (Recherche libre), etc.
HighWire Press
From Stanford University, HighWire Press boasts the largest archive of free full-text science on earth. As of 5/14/07 there were 8
free trial sites, 37 completely free and 237 e-journals with free back issues with 1,692,220 free full-text articles.