Multidisciplinary studies draws on every field at once, so this guide gathers the broadest open-access (OA) and open-educational-resource (OER) platforms that work across all disciplines — free, legal and reusable. Use it as a launchpad, then drill into FRELIP's subject-specific guides for depth.
Find resources by broad subject area
Pick the area closest to your topic and search it on FRELIP, or jump to the matching subject guide:
- Natural Sciences & Mathematics (physics, chemistry, biology, maths, earth sciences)
- Engineering & Technology (engineering, computing, applied tech)
- Health & Medicine (medicine, nursing, public health)
- Social Sciences (sociology, economics, psychology, education, law)
- Arts & Humanities (history, literature, philosophy, languages)
- Agriculture & Environment (agriculture, ecology, food, climate)
New here? Start with these courses
- FRELIP OER: Multidisciplinary Studies (this subject's open course)
- Navigating Research Guides (how to use a guide like this one)
- Accessing Open Access Journals (find free, peer-reviewed articles)
- Using VuFind Discovery Search (master the FRELIP search box)
Search everything
Search all FRELIP collections at once — books, journals, theses and feeds — from one box at search.frelip.org.
Start any cross-disciplinary inquiry with authoritative, freely available reference works for definitions, overviews and terminology.
General encyclopedias & knowledge bases
- Wikipedia (free multilingual encyclopedia; follow the cited sources)
- Wikidata (open structured-data knowledge base linking entities across fields)
- Encyclopedia of Life (open biodiversity reference)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (peer-reviewed, free; concepts across disciplines)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica (free article previews and overviews)
Dictionaries, glossaries & terminology
- Wiktionary (free multilingual dictionary)
- IATE (EU multilingual terminology database across subject domains)
- Wikipedia Glossaries index (curated field-by-field term glossaries)
Handbooks & open reference collections
- IntechOpen (open-access scholarly handbooks and edited volumes across all fields)
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias (peer-reviewed survey articles; many open)
- EOLSS (Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems; UNESCO-linked interdisciplinary reference)
Thousands of peer-reviewed scholarly books and classroom-ready open textbooks are free to read, download and adapt across every discipline.
Open-access scholarly books
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) (60,000+ peer-reviewed OA books, all fields)
- OAPEN Library (OA books in humanities and social sciences and beyond)
- Project Gutenberg (70,000+ free public-domain classic texts)
- Internet Archive — Texts (millions of digitized books and documents)
Open textbooks & OER libraries
- OpenStax (by subject) (free, peer-reviewed college textbooks across disciplines)
- LibreTexts (discipline bookshelves: bio, chem, math, geo, socialsci, human, biz, eng, med)
- Open Textbook Library (peer-reviewed open textbooks, all subjects)
- OER Commons (open educational resources for every level and field)
- BCcampus OpenEd (open textbook collection across disciplines)
- MERLOT (curated, peer-reviewed OER collection)
African open books
- African Minds (open-access scholarly books on and from Africa)
- Aluka / JSTOR Africa (digitized African scholarly and heritage materials)
Find peer-reviewed open-access articles and early-stage preprints spanning all disciplines — no paywall, no login.
Open-access journal directories & megajournals
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (20,000+ vetted OA journals, all fields)
- PLOS ONE (multidisciplinary OA megajournal)
- MDPI journals (large multidisciplinary OA publisher)
- Frontiers (OA journals across science, medicine and beyond)
- Royal Society Open Science (cross-disciplinary OA journal)
Preprint servers (early findings)
- arXiv (physics, maths, CS, quantitative biology and more)
- bioRxiv (biology preprints)
- SocArXiv (social sciences preprints)
- Preprints.org (multidisciplinary preprint platform)
African & Global-South scholarship
- African Journals OnLine (AJOL) (largest collection of African-published journals; many OA)
- SciELO (open journals from Latin America, Africa and beyond)
- Redalyc (OA journals from the Global South)
These open scholarly search engines and citation indexes let you discover papers, track impact and map the literature across every field at once.
Open discovery & bibliographic search
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine; 300M+ documents)
- CORE (world's largest aggregator of OA full texts)
- OpenAIRE Explore (linked OA research outputs and projects)
- OpenAlex (open index of 250M+ works, authors and institutions)
- Semantic Scholar (AI-powered scholarly search across disciplines)
- The Lens (free scholarly and patent literature discovery)
Citation indexes & bibliometrics
- OpenCitations (open citation data)
- Dimensions (free linked research database with citations and grants)
- Google Scholar (broad scholarly index with cited-by counts)
Multidisciplinary repositories & theses
- FRELIP Discovery Search (books, journals, theses and feeds in one place)
- NDLTD (global open electronic theses and dissertations)
- OATD (Open Access Theses and Dissertations)
Open data repositories let you find, cite and reuse datasets from any discipline, and deposit your own with a DOI.
General-purpose data repositories
- Zenodo (CERN-hosted; any data, software or output, with DOIs)
- Figshare (share figures, datasets and media across fields)
- Open Science Framework (OSF) (host projects, data and materials)
- Dryad (curated research data, especially from publications)
- Harvard Dataverse (open data repository for all disciplines)
Find a repository
- re3data (registry of 3,000+ research-data repositories by subject)
- Google Dataset Search (search datasets across the web)
Statistics & primary sources
- World Bank Open Data (global development indicators)
- UN Data (international statistical databases)
- Open Data for Africa (African statistics from the AfDB)
- Internet Archive (primary documents, audio, web and moving-image archives)
Open images, lectures, courseware and interactive media support teaching and learning in every subject — check each licence before reuse.
Images & media collections
- Wikimedia Commons (100M+ freely licensed images, audio and video)
- Openverse (search openly licensed images and audio)
- Flickr Commons (public-domain images from world archives)
- Unsplash (free-to-use high-resolution photos)
Video lectures & open courseware
- MIT OpenCourseWare (free course materials across all MIT departments)
- Khan Academy (free lessons spanning maths, science, humanities and more)
- YouTube (university and institutional lecture channels)
- TED Talks (cross-disciplinary expert talks)
Maps, simulations & interactive
- OpenStreetMap (free, editable world map)
- PhET Interactive Simulations (free science and maths simulations)
- Google Earth (3D geographic exploration)
Free tools to organize your references, build a scholarly identity, and unlock legal full text of paywalled papers.
Reference managers & citation
- Zotero (free, open-source reference manager; collect, cite, sync)
- JabRef (open-source BibTeX reference manager)
- ZoteroBib (build a bibliography fast, no account needed)
Researcher identity & profiles
- ORCID (free persistent researcher identifier)
- OpenAlex author profiles (track your works and citations openly)
Find legal full text
- Unpaywall (browser extension finding free legal versions of paywalled papers)
- CORE Discovery (one-click access to OA full text)
- Internet Archive Scholar (search and preserve scholarly full text)
Understand how to license your work, check publisher self-archiving rules, and follow open-science and accessibility standards.
Creative Commons & licensing
- Creative Commons licenses (what each CC licence allows)
- CC License Chooser (pick the right licence for your work)
Open-access policy registries
- Sherpa Romeo (publisher self-archiving and OA policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of open-access repositories)
- ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories)
Open science & responsible assessment
- Plan S / cOAlition S (funder mandate for full and immediate OA)
- DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment; assess research responsibly)
Metadata & accessibility standards
- Dublin Core (core metadata standard for describing resources)
- WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for inclusive resources)
Join the wider open-knowledge community, connect with scholarly and library associations, and keep building your skills.
Learned societies & associations
- IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)
- SPARC (global advocate for open access, open data and open education)
- FORCE11 (community advancing scholarly communication and e-research)
- Association of African Universities (AAU) (pan-African higher-education body)
- African Library & Information Associations & Institutions (AfLIA) (African library community)
Keep learning
- FRELIP OER: Multidisciplinary Studies (this subject's open course)
- Evaluating Information Sources (judge quality and credibility)
- The Research Impact Track (advanced bibliometrics and open science)
Need help?
- Search FRELIP (find resources across all collections)
- FRELIP Learning (browse all open courses)
- Email a librarian (info@frelip.org)