Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) put scholarship in history, languages, philosophy, religion, art and music freely in your hands — no paywalls, reusable under open licences. This guide curates the best free, stable sources for African researchers, students and librarians.
Subdisciplines — jump in
- History & Archaeology (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
- Languages & Literature (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
- Philosophy (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
- Religion & Theology (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
- Visual & Performing Arts (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
- Music (FRELIP search) · Arts & Humanities OER course
New here? Start with these courses
- Arts & Humanities OER (this subject)
- Navigating Research Guides
- Accessing Open Access Journals
- Using VuFind Discovery Search
Search everything
One search box across the FRELIP eLibrary: search.frelip.org.
Free, authoritative reference works to define terms, get orientation and find citations across the humanities.
General
- Wikipedia (free encyclopedia; follow its references to scholarly sources)
- Encyclopedia.com (aggregated reference entries)
- Wiktionary (free multilingual dictionary & glossary)
History & Archaeology
- World History Encyclopedia (open, peer-reviewed entries)
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (some open entries)
Languages & Literature
- Oxford Reference (literary terms; selected open content)
- Glottolog (reference catalogue of the world's languages, incl. African)
Philosophy
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (free, peer-reviewed)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (open, peer-reviewed)
- PhilPapers (index & bibliography of philosophy)
Religion & Theology
- Britannica: Religion (overview entries)
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (selected open entries)
Visual & Performing Arts
- Smarthistory (free art-history reference essays)
Music
- IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library (public-domain scores & reference)
Full-text open books and openly licensed textbooks you can read, download and reuse.
General OA book platforms
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (peer-reviewed OA books)
- OAPEN Library (OA books, strong in humanities)
- Project Gutenberg (70,000+ public-domain literary texts)
- Internet Archive — Texts (digitized books & primary sources)
- OER Commons (open educational resources)
- Open Textbook Library (peer-reviewed open textbooks)
Open textbook libraries
- LibreTexts — Humanities (discipline bookshelf)
- LibreTexts — Social Sciences (history, religion contexts)
- BCcampus OpenEd (open textbook collection)
History & Archaeology
- LibreTexts — History bookshelf
- OAPEN — African history (OA monographs)
Languages & Literature
- LibreTexts — Literature & Literacy
- Language Science Press (OA linguistics monographs, incl. African languages)
Philosophy
Religion & Theology
Visual & Performing Arts
- LibreTexts — Art bookshelf
- The Met — free art publications (downloadable catalogues)
Music
Peer-reviewed open-access journals and preprint/working-paper servers across the humanities.
General & multidisciplinary
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (vetted OA journals; browse by subject)
- OpenAIRE (OA research outputs)
- African Journals Online (AJOL) (largest collection of African-published journals)
History & Archaeology
Languages & Literature
- DOAJ — Literature journals
- Glossa (OA journal of general linguistics)
Philosophy
- DOAJ — Philosophy journals
- PhilArchive (open philosophy preprint archive)
Religion & Theology
- DOAJ — Religion journals
- HTS Teologiese Studies (South Africa) (OA theology journal)
Visual & Performing Arts
Music
Preprints across fields
- SocArXiv (humanities & social science preprints)
- Humanities Commons / CORE repository (open deposit of humanities work)
Open discovery engines, bibliographic indexes and citation tools to find and trace humanities scholarship.
Discovery & bibliographic
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine; OA-focused)
- CORE (world's largest aggregation of OA papers)
- OpenAIRE Explore (linked research outputs)
- OpenAlex (open scholarly index of works, authors, venues)
- Semantic Scholar (AI-powered literature search)
- The Lens (scholarly & patent search)
Citation indexes
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions (free tier; publications & citations)
Subject-specific indexes
- PhilPapers (philosophy index & bibliography)
- Atla Religion Database (religion/theology indexing)
- RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (music scholarship index)
- MLA International Bibliography (languages & literature)
- Glottolog (catalogue & bibliography of world languages)
General data repositories plus humanities datasets, archives and digitized primary sources.
General repositories
- Zenodo (CERN-backed open repository for any data/output)
- Dryad (curated research data)
- Figshare (data, figures, media)
- Open Science Framework (OSF) (project & data hosting)
- re3data (registry of research data repositories)
History, archaeology & primary sources
- Digital Public Library of America (millions of digitized items)
- Europeana (Europe's cultural-heritage primary sources)
- Internet Archive (texts, audio, archival materials)
- Aluka (JSTOR) (African cultural-heritage primary sources)
- Open Context (open archaeological data)
Languages & literature data
Arts & music data
- Europeana — Music collection
- MusicBrainz (open music metadata database)
Openly licensed images, audio, video and free courseware to learn and to illustrate your work.
Images & cultural heritage
- Wikimedia Commons (free media; vast art & history holdings)
- The Met Open Access (public-domain artworks)
- Google Arts & Culture (museum collections & exhibits)
- Flickr Commons (institutional public-domain photo archives)
Video & courseware
- MIT OpenCourseWare (free course materials, incl. humanities)
- Khan Academy — Humanities (art history & more)
- Smarthistory (free art-history videos)
- The British Museum (YouTube) (object & history videos)
Audio & music
- Musopen (free recordings & public-domain sheet music)
- IMSLP (public-domain scores & recordings)
- LibriVox (free public-domain audiobooks)
Maps & spatial
- David Rumsey Map Collection (historical maps)
Free tools to manage references, build a scholarly identity, find full text and analyse texts.
Reference managers
- Zotero (free, open-source reference manager)
- JabRef (open-source BibTeX manager)
- ZoteroBib (quick bibliographies, no install)
Scholarly identity
- ORCID (persistent researcher identifier)
Find full text
- Unpaywall (browser extension for legal OA copies)
- CORE Discovery (one-click OA full text)
Writing & text analysis (humanities)
- Voyant Tools (text reading & analysis for the humanities)
- Zotero Style Repository (MLA, Chicago & other citation styles)
- Tropy (organize research photos of archival sources)
The licensing, rights-checking and standards frameworks behind open scholarship.
Licensing
- Creative Commons (open licences explained)
- CC License Chooser (pick the right licence)
Self-archiving & repository rights
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher OA & self-archiving policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR (registry of open-access repositories)
OA & assessment policy
- Plan S / cOAlition S (OA mandate framework)
- DORA (responsible research assessment)
Metadata & accessibility standards
- Dublin Core (metadata standard)
- WCAG (web content accessibility guidelines)
Connect with scholarly communities in the humanities and keep building your skills.
Learned societies & associations
- American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) (humanities umbrella)
- Modern Language Association (MLA) (languages & literature)
- American Philosophical Association (philosophy)
- American Academy of Religion (religion & theology)
- International Council for Traditions of Music & Dance (music, strong African network)
- CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa)