Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) put peer-reviewed engineering research, open textbooks and design tools in front of every African student, researcher and practitioner — at no cost and with no paywall. This guide curates the best free, reusable resources across engineering, computing, the built environment and materials science.
Subdisciplines — jump in
- Engineering (General) — search FRELIP · Subject OER course
- Computer Science & IT — search FRELIP · Subject OER course
- Architecture & Built Environment — search FRELIP · Subject OER course
- Applied & Materials Science — search FRELIP · Subject OER course
New here? Start with these courses
- Engineering & Technology OER (this subject)
- Navigating Research Guides
- Accessing Open Access Journals
- Using VuFind Discovery Search
Search everything
Use the FRELIP discovery search to find books, articles, theses and data across every collection at once: search.frelip.org.
Start here for definitions, terminology, standards vocabulary and quick-reference handbooks across engineering and technology.
General Engineering & Technology
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Technology (vetted reference articles on engineering fields)
- Wikipedia Engineering Portal (CC BY-SA encyclopedia, deep cross-links)
- IUPAC Gold Book (compendium of chemical terminology used across materials/process engineering)
Computer Science & IT
- NIST Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures (authoritative CS glossary)
- FOLDOC — Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing (open computing dictionary)
- NIST Computer Security Resource Center Glossary (cybersecurity terms)
Architecture & Built Environment
- Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) (open controlled vocabulary)
- Designing Buildings Wiki (open construction-industry knowledge base)
Applied & Materials Science
- NIST Standard Reference Data (materials properties, thermophysical data)
- The Materials Project (open computed properties of known and predicted materials)
Free, legally downloadable scholarly books and openly licensed textbooks you can read, print and adapt.
OA book platforms (all subjects)
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (peer-reviewed OA academic books)
- OAPEN Library (OA monographs in science & engineering)
- Open Textbook Library (vetted, adoptable open textbooks)
- OER Commons (open courseware and texts, browsable by subject)
- Internet Archive — Texts (digitised classics and technical works)
Engineering (General)
- Engineering LibreTexts (open engineering textbook library)
- OpenStax — University Physics & Calculus (free foundational STEM texts)
- Open Textbook Library — Engineering (subject browse)
Computer Science & IT
- LibreTexts — Computer Science Bookshelf
- Think Python (Green Tea Press) (free CC-licensed programming text)
- MIT Press Open — algorithms & CS titles (selected open MIT Press books)
Architecture & Built Environment
Applied & Materials Science
- LibreTexts — Materials Science Bookshelf
- Chemistry LibreTexts (foundational chemistry for materials)
Peer-reviewed open-access journals plus preprint servers where you can read the latest research before formal publication.
Engineering (General)
- DOAJ — Engineering journals (search)
- engrXiv (engineering preprint server)
- Applied Sciences (MDPI, OA) (broad applied engineering)
Computer Science & IT
- arXiv — Computer Science (cs) (preprints across all CS fields)
- DOAJ — Computer Science journals (search)
- Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) (flagship OA ML journal)
Architecture & Built Environment
- DOAJ — Architecture journals (search)
- Buildings (MDPI, OA) (built-environment research)
Applied & Materials Science
- arXiv — Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci)
- DOAJ — Materials Science journals (search)
- Materials (MDPI, OA)
African & multidisciplinary
- African Journals OnLine (AJOL) (African-published engineering & tech journals)
- PLOS (open-access multidisciplinary publisher)
Search across millions of open records to discover papers, theses, datasets and citation links.
Discovery & bibliographic
- BASE — Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (300M+ OA documents)
- CORE (world's largest aggregator of OA research papers)
- OpenAIRE Explore (open scholarly graph)
- OpenAlex (open index of works, authors, institutions)
- Semantic Scholar (AI-powered literature search)
- The Lens (scholarly works & patents combined)
Citation indexes
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions (free linked research data & citations)
Subject-specific
- DBLP Computer Science Bibliography (definitive CS publication index)
- Connected Papers (visual literature maps for any field)
- Google Patents (engineering & materials patent search)
Find, reuse and deposit open research data, code and primary sources for engineering and technology.
General-purpose repositories
- Zenodo (CERN-backed repository for data, software & reports)
- Figshare (datasets, figures and supplementary files)
- Dryad (curated research data)
- OSF — Open Science Framework (projects, data & preprints)
- re3data (registry of research data repositories)
Subject-specific data
- The Materials Project (computed materials properties)
- UCI Machine Learning Repository (classic ML/CS datasets)
- Kaggle Datasets (open data for data science & engineering)
- NIST Public Data Repository (measurement & materials data)
African & geospatial primary sources
- OpenStreetMap (open geospatial data for infrastructure/built-environment)
- Google Earth Engine (open geospatial datasets for civil/environmental work)
Lectures, open courseware, diagrams, simulations and interactive tools to learn engineering and technology visually.
Open courseware & video
- MIT OpenCourseWare (full engineering & CS course materials)
- Khan Academy — Science & Engineering (free tutorials)
- edX (audit university engineering courses for free)
- Class Central — Engineering MOOCs (catalogue of free courses)
Images & media
- Wikimedia Commons — Engineering (freely reusable images & diagrams)
- Wikimedia Commons — Architecture
Simulations & interactive tools
- PhET Interactive Simulations (physics & engineering sims)
- Falstad Circuit Simulator (interactive electronics)
- nanoHUB (online simulation tools for nanotech & materials)
Free tools to organise citations, claim your scholarly identity, find full text and write up your work.
Reference managers
- Zotero (free, open-source reference manager)
- JabRef (open BibTeX manager, great for LaTeX/engineering)
- ZoteroBib (quick browser-based bibliography builder)
Researcher identity
- ORCID (free persistent researcher identifier)
Find full text legally
- Unpaywall (browser extension surfacing legal OA copies)
- CORE Discovery (one-click access to free full text)
Writing & analysis
- Overleaf (collaborative LaTeX for engineering papers)
- Project Jupyter (open notebooks for computation & data)
- diagrams.net (draw.io) (free diagrams, schematics & flowcharts)
Understand how to license your work, check publisher OA policies and meet accessibility and metadata standards.
Creative Commons & licensing
- Creative Commons Licenses (overview of CC licences)
- CC License Chooser (pick the right licence for your work)
Open-access policy & repositories
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher self-archiving & OA policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR — Registry of Open Access Repositories
- Plan S / cOAlition S (open-access funder mandate)
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)
Metadata & accessibility
- Dublin Core Metadata Terms (interoperable resource description)
- WCAG — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Connect with professional bodies, learn alongside peers, and reach out when you need help.
Learned societies & associations
- IEEE (global body for electrical, electronics & computing engineering)
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
- ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers)
- UIA — International Union of Architects
Keep learning (Moodle)
Need help?
- FRELIP Discovery Search (find resources across all collections)
- FRELIP Learning (Moodle) (courses & tutorials)
- Email a librarian — info@frelip.org