Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) give African researchers, students and librarians free, legal access to physics, chemistry, astronomy, earth sciences and mathematics literature, textbooks and data. This guide curates the most reliable open resources for each subdiscipline.
Subdisciplines — jump in
- Physics — search FRELIP & see the Physical Sciences OER course
- Chemistry — search FRELIP & see the Physical Sciences OER course
- Astronomy & Astrophysics — search FRELIP & see the Physical Sciences OER course
- Earth Sciences & Geology — search FRELIP & see the Physical Sciences OER course
- Mathematics — search FRELIP & see the Physical Sciences OER course
New here? Start with these courses
- Physical Sciences OER Course (this subject's open course)
- Navigating Research Guides
- Accessing Open Access Journals
- Using VuFind Discovery Search
Search everything
Search the full FRELIP collection across all formats at search.frelip.org.
Free encyclopedias, glossaries, terminology and handbook resources for the physical sciences.
General
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Physical Science (overview articles)
- Wikidata (open structured scientific terminology & identifiers)
Physics
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Physics entries (peer-reviewed)
- NIST — Fundamental Physical Constants (CODATA)
- HyperPhysics (concept-mapped physics reference)
Chemistry
- IUPAC Gold Book (compendium of chemical terminology)
- PubChem (open chemical compound encyclopedia)
- NIST Chemistry WebBook (thermochemical & spectral data)
Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (open vocabulary)
Earth Sciences & Geology
- Handbook of Mineralogy (free PDF mineral data)
- USGS Geologic terminology & names
Mathematics
- NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
- Encyclopedia of Mathematics (open, EMS/Springer)
- Wolfram MathWorld (free math reference)
Free OA books and openly licensed textbooks you can read, download and reuse.
General OA book platforms
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- OAPEN Library
- Project Gutenberg (classic science texts)
- Internet Archive — Texts
- OER Commons
- Open Textbook Library — Physics
Physics
Chemistry
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Earth Sciences & Geology
Mathematics
- OpenStax — Math (Algebra, Calculus, Statistics)
- LibreTexts — Mathematics
- AIM Open Textbook Initiative (vetted free math texts)
Peer-reviewed open access journals and preprint servers across the physical sciences.
General & multidisciplinary
Physics
Chemistry
- ChemRxiv (chemistry preprints)
- Chemical Science (RSC, OA)
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Earth Sciences & Geology
- EarthArXiv (geoscience preprints)
Mathematics
Open discovery, bibliographic and citation databases to find physical-science literature.
Discovery & bibliographic
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
- CORE (world's largest OA aggregator)
- OpenAIRE Explore
- OpenAlex
- Semantic Scholar
- The Lens (scholarship & patents)
Citation indexes
- OpenCitations
- Dimensions (free version)
Subject-specific
- NASA ADS (astronomy & physics literature)
- INSPIRE-HEP (high-energy physics)
- zbMATH Open (mathematics)
- CAS Common Chemistry (open substance index)
Open research-data repositories and discipline-specific data sources.
General repositories
- Zenodo (CERN-hosted, any discipline)
- Dryad
- Figshare
- OSF (Open Science Framework)
- re3data (registry of data repositories)
Physics & Chemistry
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Earth Sciences & Geology
- NASA Earthdata
- PANGAEA (earth & environmental data)
- USGS EarthExplorer (remote-sensing & African coverage)
Mathematics
- OEIS (Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences)
Open images, courseware, video and interactive simulations for the physical sciences.
Images
Video & courseware
- MIT OpenCourseWare — Science
- Khan Academy — Science & Math
- CrashCourse (physics, chemistry, astronomy)
Simulations & interactives
- PhET Interactive Simulations (physics, chemistry, math)
- MolView (3D molecule viewer)
- Stellarium Web (online planetarium)
- GeoGebra (interactive math)
Free tools to manage references, identify yourself as a researcher, and locate open full text.
Reference managers
Researcher identity
- ORCID (persistent researcher ID)
Find full text
- Unpaywall (browser extension for legal OA copies)
- CORE Discovery
Writing & analysis (physical sciences)
- Overleaf (collaborative LaTeX for equations & papers)
- WolframAlpha (computation & problem solving)
- Jupyter (open notebooks for data analysis)
Key open-access policies, licensing tools and standards for reusing and sharing physical-science work.
Licensing
Open-access policy directories
- Sherpa Romeo (journal self-archiving policies)
- OpenDOAR (directory of OA repositories)
- ROAR (registry of OA repositories)
OA & assessment mandates
- Plan S / cOAlition S
- DORA (Declaration on Research Assessment)
Metadata & accessibility standards
- Dublin Core (metadata standard)
- WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
Connect with learned societies and continue building your skills.
Learned societies & associations
- International Union of Pure & Applied Physics (IUPAP)
- International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)
- International Astronomical Union (IAU)
- International Mathematical Union (IMU)
- African Physical Society (AfPS) (African association)
- African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS)