This is FRELIP's cross-disciplinary gateway: open-access (OA) journals, books and data plus open educational resources (OER) that work across every field. Use it when you are starting out, browsing broadly, or pointing students and researchers to free, legal scholarship.
Find resources by broad subject area
Search everything across FRELIP, then dive into the matching subject guide.
- FRELIP Discovery Search (one search box across journals, books, theses and feeds)
- Science & Technology (physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, computing)
- Health & Medicine (medicine, nursing, public health)
- Social Sciences (sociology, economics, education, law)
- Arts & Humanities (history, languages, philosophy, literature)
- Agriculture & Environment (agronomy, ecology, climate)
New here? Start with these courses
- General Resources OER Course (this subject's free FRELIP course)
- Navigating Research Guides (how to use guides like this one)
- Accessing Open Access Journals (find and use OA articles)
- Using VuFind Discovery Search (master the search box)
Search everything
Whatever your topic, begin at search.frelip.org — it indexes OA journals, open books, African theses and curated feeds in one place.
Free, authoritative reference works for quick facts, definitions and background across all disciplines.
General encyclopedias & knowledge bases
- Wikipedia (free encyclopedia; follow the cited sources)
- Wikidata (open, structured knowledge base)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (peer-reviewed, free)
- Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (UNESCO-affiliated overviews)
Dictionaries & terminology
- Wiktionary (free multilingual dictionary)
- Wordnik (definitions, examples and corpora)
- IATE (EU multilingual terminology database)
Statistics & country reference
- World Bank Open Data (global development indicators)
- Our World in Data (research and data on global challenges)
- Ghana Statistical Service (example African national statistics office)
- UN Library Research Guides (official intergovernmental reference)
Read and download full books and textbooks legally and for free, spanning every discipline.
OA book libraries
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (peer-reviewed OA books)
- OAPEN Library (OA books in the humanities and social sciences)
- Project Gutenberg (70,000+ public-domain classics)
- Internet Archive — Texts (millions of digitized books)
Open textbooks & OER collections
- OpenStax (peer-reviewed free textbooks by subject)
- LibreTexts (discipline bookshelves: bio, chem, math, geo, socialsci and more)
- Open Textbook Library (reviewed open textbooks, all fields)
- OER Commons (searchable hub of open learning materials)
- BCcampus Open Textbooks (open texts for higher education)
- MERLOT (curated, peer-reviewed learning resources)
African open books
- African Minds (OA scholarly books from and about Africa)
- Aluka (JSTOR) (digital African heritage and scholarly materials)
Find peer-reviewed open-access journals and early-stage preprints across all fields.
OA journal directories & publishers
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (vetted OA journals, all subjects)
- PLOS (multidisciplinary OA publisher)
- Frontiers (OA journals across science and medicine)
- MDPI (large multidisciplinary OA publisher)
- eLife (OA life and biomedical sciences)
Preprint servers
- arXiv (physics, math, CS, quantitative fields)
- bioRxiv (biology preprints)
- SocArXiv (social sciences preprints)
- Preprints.org (multidisciplinary preprints)
African journal platforms
- African Journals Online (AJOL) (largest collection of African-published journals)
- SciELO (OA journals from the Global South)
- Redalyc (OA journals, Latin America & beyond)
Open discovery tools and citation indexes to locate scholarship and trace how it connects.
Discovery & aggregators
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine; 300M+ documents)
- CORE (world's largest aggregator of OA research)
- OpenAIRE Explore (European OA research graph)
- OpenAlex (open index of 250M+ works, authors, venues)
- Semantic Scholar (AI-powered scholarly search)
- The Lens (scholarly works and patents, free tier)
Citation indexes & bibliometrics
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions (free linked research database)
- Google Scholar (broad scholarly search and citation counts)
Specialist indexes
Open repositories to find, reuse and deposit research data, plus broad primary-source collections.
General data repositories
- Zenodo (CERN-hosted, any discipline, gives a DOI)
- Dryad (curated research data, all fields)
- Figshare (datasets, figures and supplementary files)
- Open Science Framework (OSF) (project management and data sharing)
- re3data (registry to find the right discipline repository)
- Google Dataset Search (search engine for datasets)
Official & statistical data
- World Bank Open Data (development indicators)
- Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) (UN OCHA crisis and development data)
- World Bank Microdata Library (survey and census microdata)
Primary sources & archives
- Library of Congress Digital Collections (vast primary sources)
- Europeana (digitized cultural heritage)
Openly licensed images, video lectures, full courses and interactive media for learning and reuse.
Images & media files
- Wikimedia Commons (free images, audio and video)
- Openverse (search 800M+ openly licensed media)
- Unsplash (free high-resolution photographs)
Video lectures & full courses
- MIT OpenCourseWare (free MIT course materials)
- Khan Academy (free lessons across subjects)
- Open Yale Courses (full recorded Yale courses)
- TED-Ed (short educational videos)
- edX (free-to-audit university courses)
Simulations, maps & interactives
- PhET Interactive Simulations (science and math simulations)
- OpenStreetMap (free, editable world map)
- Gapminder Tools (animated data visualizations)
Free tools to organize references, get an academic ID, and unlock full text legally.
Reference managers & citation
- Zotero (free, open-source reference manager)
- JabRef (open-source BibTeX manager)
- ZoteroBib (build a bibliography instantly, no install)
- MyBib (free web citation generator)
Identifiers & profiles
Find full text legally
- Unpaywall (browser extension finding free legal copies)
- CORE Discovery (one-click access to free full text)
- LazyScholar (browser tool to locate PDFs and citations)
Understand open licences, author rights, and the standards behind responsible open scholarship.
Open licensing
- Creative Commons Licences (the standard suite of open licences)
- CC License Chooser (pick the right licence for your work)
- Open Source Initiative — Licenses (for software and code)
Author rights & repository registries
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher OA and self-archiving policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR (registry of open-access repositories)
Open-science mandates & assessment
- Plan S / cOAlition S (funder OA mandate)
- DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)
- UNESCO Open Science Recommendation (global open-science framework)
Metadata & accessibility standards
- Dublin Core Metadata Terms (standard descriptive metadata)
- WCAG Accessibility Guidelines (make content usable by everyone)
Join the wider open-knowledge community and keep building your skills with FRELIP.
Open-knowledge associations
- SPARC (advocacy for open access and open education)
- Open Education Global (international OER community)
- FORCE11 (community advancing scholarly communication)
- IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)
African networks
- African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA) (continental library body)
- Open Access in Africa via AJOL (see African Journals Online community)
- Association of African Universities (AAU) (higher-education network)
Keep learning (FRELIP courses)
- General Resources OER Course (this subject's course)
- Evaluating Information Sources (judge quality and credibility)
- The Research Impact Track (advanced bibliometrics and open science)