Highlighted Databases: Open Scholarship

In July, we highlight research resources that are open for scholarship -- both open access (for research articles and books) and open educational resources (for teaching and learning materials, including textbooks and syllabi). Covering a range of disciplines and academic program interests at Teachers College, the databases listed are especially useful for those enrolled in non-credit bearing courses or with limited access to paywalled databases.

Open Access

The Avalon Project is maintained by Yale Law School, the Avalon Project provides full-text digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. Contains special collections such at 9/11, Cold War, and Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents.

BASE is a search engine specifically for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 300 million documents from more than 10,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

LOADB (Listing of Open Access DataBases) is a web-enabled, linked, classified and categorized collection of Open Access Databases which one can access from a single portal. Although initial focus is on science and technology subjects, the ultimate aim is to include all subject areas.

OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access resources that was built by harvesting from open access collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

OATD  (Open Access Thesis and Dissertations) aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. They have indexed over 6,510,557 theses and dissertations.

Science.gov is a gateway to U.S. government science information. The portal offers free access to research and development (R&D) results and scientific and technical information from scientific organizations across 13 federal agencies. Science.gov makes it possible for users to search over 60 databases, over 2,200 websites, and over 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information in many formats, including full-text documents, citations, scientific data supporting federally funded research, and multimedia.

PubMed --- Public Version. NCBIs primary text search and retrieval system that integrates the PubMed database of biomedical literature with 38 other literature and molecular databases including DNA and protein sequence, structure, gene, genome, genetic variation and gene expression.

Emerald Insight Open Access offers open access, peer-reviewed journals from Emerald Insight.

ERIC indexes education research found in journal articles, books, and grey literature. Some full-text is openly available to the public.

Open Educational Resources

AMSER  (The Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library.

BCampus contains hundreds of high quality resources selected for post-secondary curricula in British Columbia and Canada and maintains the B.C. Open Textbook Collection.

Internet Archive OER Collection is maintained by the Internet Archive of OERs.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) provides users of OER materials with a wealth of services and functions that can enhance their instructional experience. The MERLOT collection consists of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection.

MIT Open Courseware is a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.

OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER that addresses the needs of teachers and learners.

Be sure to check out additional resources on the Open Scholarship LibGuide.