What is Open Access?
**NOTE**
While academic journal articles may be found on some of these sites, the primary location for peer-reviewed journals through BCC Databases can be found here.
50 shades of Open - This is a great resource for understanding open Access and what it means.
There are many types of open access, perhaps because it is such a young movement that it's still developing standards. That said, there are three basic types:
Directory of Open Access Books 
Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: DOAB
Directory of Open Access Books is a joint service of OAPEN, OpenEdition, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université providing access to 27660 Academic peer-reviewed books from 379 publishers.
Open Access titles from Berghahn Books Online.
See also Berghahn Books' statement on COVID-19 access.
___________________________________________________________
From McMaster University, ACCESSSS is designed to find the best evidence-based answer to your clinical questions by simultaneously searching the leading evidence-driven medical publications and high-quality clinical literature. Register for free and choose Stony Brook University from the Resource Portal list to get full-text links.
Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR)
By Congressional mandate, ATSDR produces "toxicological profiles" for hazardous substances found at National Priorities List (NPL) sites. These hazardous substances are ranked based on the frequency of occurrence at NPL sites, toxicity, and potential for human exposure. Toxicological profiles are developed from a priority list of 275 substances. ATSDR also prepares toxicological profiles for the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Energy (DOE) on substances related to federal sites.
Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: National Agricultural Library
Citations to literature created by the National Library of Agriculture and similar institutions. Drawn from 1,400 international journals. Covers materials in all formats, including printed works from the fifteenth century. Useful for researchers in biology and environmental science.
Amazon Kindle Free eBook Collections 
Free classics and out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books, as well as limited-time free promotional ebooks available for Kindle.
American Libraries 
A sub-collection of the Open-Access Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. The focus is on text collections contributed by U.S. libraries.
Searchable database containing roughly 4 million descriptions of archival collections in 1,000 libraries, museums, historical societies and manuscript repositories around the world. Also useful for identifying archival repositories by location. Read more in our GC Library blog post about ArchiveGrid.
Open access to over 70,000 e-prints in biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, and statistics.
___________________________________________________________
Open Access titles from Berghahn Books Online.
See also Berghahn Books' statement on COVID-19 access.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
A sub-collection of the Open-Access Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. Ten major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions joined together to form the Biodiversity Heritage Library Project. They are developing a strategy and operational plan to digitize the published literature of biodiversity held in their respective collections and make it available through a global biodiversity commons.
Open-access journals in biology and medicine. As of 2021, 367 titles are available.
Alternative Name(s) & Keywords: Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: A Selection of Primary Sources
This site is a curated selection of primary sources for teaching and learning about the struggles and triumphs of Black Americans. Developed with input from Black history scholars and advisors, this resource is freely available on the web and to libraries. The site will include more than 2,000 curated documents around six crucial phases of the U.S. Black freedom struggle. Each time period features an overview plus organized information and links to primary source documents about the relevant people, places, related government documents.
___________________________________________________________
Canadian Libraries
A sub-collection of the Open-Access Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. The focus is on text collections contributed by Canadian libraries.
Census Data
This database supersedes American FactFinder. The new database includes American Community Survey; 1-year Selected Population Profiles 2010-2015; 5-year Selected Population Tables 2011-2015; 5-Year American Indian; Alaska Native Population Profiles; 2000 and 2010 Decennial Summary and Redistricting Data Summary Files.
ChemRxiv
ChemRxiv (pronounced "chem-archive") is a free online submission, distribution, and archival service for unpublished preprints in chemistry and related areas. ChemRxiv is operated by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit and the world's largest scientific society, in collaboration with partners.
ChemSpider
ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast text and structure search access to over 67 million structures from hundreds of data sources.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Text of 729 newspapers from 1836 to 1922, including three New York papers: The Evening World, The Sun, and The New York Tribune.
ClinicalTrials.gov
Provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, ClinicalTrials.gov is a database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world.
___________________________________________________________
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
service of OAPEN Foundation based at the National Library in The Hague. The database contains more than 5,000 academic, peer-reviewed books from 163 publishers.
___________________________________________________________
Ebook and Text Archives
A sub-set of the Internet Archive. This collection is comprised of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses, contributed by the Internet Archive Community.
EduRef
Dates vary. Includes over 2,000 lesson plans and other resources and services to the education community. From the Information Institute of Syracuse.
Electronic Capito Project
Provides access to the full text of letters from and to Wolfgang Faber Capito (c. 1478-1541).
English Short-Title Catalogue
Comprehensive, international union catalog listing early books, serials, newspapers, and selected ephemera printed before 1801. Contains catalog entries for items issued in Britain, Ireland, overseas territories under British colonial rule, and the United States.
___________________________________________________________
Free Medical Journals
The Free Medical Journals database provides unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. Some of the featured journals include the New England Journal of Medicine, British Medicine Journal, Brain: a Journal of Neurology, and Clinical Infectious Diseases.
___________________________________________________________
Gallica
Gallica digital library from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Over a million documents are accessible for free: Books, Manuscripts, Maps, Images, Newspapers, Magazines, Periodicals, Sound records, Music, Scores, etc.
Google Books
Service from Google Inc. searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned. On Google Books, you can read books and magazines, download them for later, cite them and translate them.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar searches across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites. PLEASE NOTE: Google Scholar does not search all of Stony Brook's subscription databases.
Gutenberg-e
Fulltext. E-books on historical studies published by Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association. Each e-book offers extensive documentation, hyperlinks to supplementary literature, images, music, video, search feature, and links to related websites.
___________________________________________________________
HathiTrust makes the digitized collections of some of the nation’s great research libraries available for all. HathiTrust has partnerships with over 90 institutions providing more than a million open access.
HighWire Press offers free access to over 1,900,000 full-text articles from scientific, medical, and psychiatric journals. Not all content is free.
___________________________________________________________
Ideas
Date coverage varies. Citations and abstracts. Research Papers in Economics database of working papers (244,000), journal articles (356,000), book and chapter listings (3,700), and software components (1,600) from 63 countries.
Internet Archive - Open Library
Offers over 12,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.
Iowa Research Online
A service of the University of Iowa Libraries, dedicated to preserving and providing open access to the scholarly and creative work of the University.
___________________________________________________________
J
J is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal on all-natural and applied sciences, published quarterly online by MDPI. Our goal is to improve the fast dissemination of new research results and ideas and to allow research groups to build new studies, innovations, and knowledge without delay.
___________________________________________________________
Kidney and Blood Pressure Research
___________________________________________________________
LibreTexts LibreTexts is the adaptable, user-friendly open education resource platform that educators trust for creating, customizing, and sharing accessible, interactive textbooks, adaptive homework, and ancillary materials.
LibreTexts Mathematics - This Living Library is a principal hub of the LibreTexts project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve postsecondary education at all levels of higher learning.
___________________________________________________________
National Academic Press Free eBooks
Created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine with more than 8,500 titles in PDF format.
Provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.
___________________________________________________________
Offers over 53,000 free ebooks, most of which are primary source texts: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
___________________________________________________________
Launched in December 2013, ROAD provides free access to those ISSN bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access: journals, monographic series, conference proceedings, academic repositories, and scholarly blogs. These records, created by the ISSN Network (93 National Centres worldwide + the International Centre), are enriched by information extracted from indexing and abstracting databases, directories (DOAJ, Latindex, The Keepers registry), and journals indicators (Scopus).
___________________________________________________________
Project of the U.S. Library of Congress and UNESCO. Makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.
The full-text version of the book is now available from MIT Press in multiple open access formats.
SHERPA overview of open access
Article by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. for digital-scholarship.org.
Benefits of open access for various audiences.
A brief overview of open access and its related issues from Peter Suber.
A student-focused Open Access advocacy website run by The Right to Research Coalition.
OASIS offers practical steps for implementing Open Access for researchers, librarians, publishers, administrators, students and the public.
Resources from SPARC about Open Access.
A website with resources for celebrating Open Access week every October.
