Open access directories

The main focus here is on academic and scholarly literature in English and French (listed separately). I haven’t included the various search and access sites for fiction, popular literature and audiobooks. Shadow libraries are not included either. Feel free to email me if you have any additional suggestions.

Updated 30 August 2025

Open access sites with search functions

Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a unique and extensive index of diverse open access journals from around the world, driven by a growing community, and is committed to ensuring quality content is freely available online for everyone.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. The search indicates if the item is open access.

Google Books
Provides extracts from some books. In response to search queries, Google Books allows users to view full pages from books in which the search terms appear if the book is out of copyright or if the copyright owner has given permission. More details here.

Free full PDF
Mainly focused on science and some social sciences

Open access Australasia
Information and resource site

Open access button
You can also install this as a browser extension. Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.

Open and free content on JSTOR and Artstor

OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. You can search and browse through thousands of registered repositories based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of books or individual stories in the public domain.

Unpaywall
An open database of 52,246,760 free scholarly articles. Unpaywall is run by OurResearch, a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarship more accessible to everyone.

Digital lending libraries

Open library
Controlled digital lending. Open Library is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation, building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Other projects include the Wayback Machine, archive.org and archive-it.org

Curated lists

List of OA journals in geography, political ecology, anthropology, planning, area studies, and various social sciences on Simon Batterbury’s site. Original post in 2015 partially updated in 2025

Paid subscription services (some with limited free tiers)

Academia.edu
Academia.edu is a commercial platform for sharing academic research that is uploaded and distributed by researchers from around the world.

Perlego
Perlego has over 1,000,000 professional and academic titles across 900+ different topics and subtopics. Access via paid subscription only

ResearchGate
ResearchGate is a commercial European social networking site for researchers which allows papers to be shared and researchers to network.

Scribd
Scribd is a digital document library, with over 195M documents. Find and upload text on every topic and niche, from academic papers and legal documents, to DIY hobbies, manuals, and more.

Lists of open access sites and search engines

Free ebook platforms
Guide on the University of Melbourne site

Other suggestions

Public and municipal libraries
Check the community lending conditions of libraries at universities where you have studied or worked.

Open access sites in French

Cairn.info
Bibliothèque numérique en sciences humaines et sociales. Cairn.info vise à favoriser la découverte par le plus grand nombre d’une recherche scientifique francophone de qualité, tout en cultivant l’indépendance et la diversité des acteurs de l’écosystème du savoir.

OpenEdition
OpenEdition est un portail de ressources électroniques en sciences humaines et sociales.

Persée
Persee.fr est un portail de diffusion de publications scientifiques, principalement dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales mais aussi des sciences de la Terre et de l’environnement. […] C’est un service de l’Université de Lyon, du CNRS et de l’ENS de Lyon qui bénéficie du soutien du Ministère de l’Education Nationale et de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche.

HAL. Science Ouverte
HAL est une archive ouverte multidisciplinaire permettant de partager en libre accès les résultats de recherche, publiés ou non. Elle est au service des chercheur.es affilié.es à des institutions académiques, qu’elles soient publiques ou privées. En France, HAL est l’archive nationale choisie par la communauté scientifique et universitaire française pour la diffusion ouverte de ses résultats de recherche. L’archive est également accessible aux chercheur.es affilié.es à des institutions académiques étrangères, publiques ou privées.