Biblioteka
Open Access databases
For general and multidisciplinary research
Internet Archive / openlibrary.org
“The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account”.
Directory of Open Access Books
The website provides reliable academic works as well as monographs and reference books.
Open Textbook Library
Open Textbooks Library offers textbooks from various disciplines, such as: Business, Computer Science, Education, Engeneering, Humanities, Journalism, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Natural and Social Sciences. The books can be read online as well as downloaded in PDF or ebook format.
BASE
“BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library”.
OAPEN
“OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication”.
The platform contains lots of book available online, in PDF files. Some of them, though, are limited and accessible only to logged users.
The books can be easily searched since they are catalogued by subjects.
DART-Europe E-theses Portal
The platform aggregates e-theses and academic works of scholars affiliated to European universities.
Online Books Library
Online Books Library “includes more than 2 million works in various formats […]”. All the books are free for personal, noncommercial use. They can be searched by author, title or subject. While browsing books by subject, you can use “extended shelves” option, which specifies the criteria of searching.
For searching works of Polish authors
AMUR – Adam Mickiewicz University Repository
AMUR is a platform which aims at promoting academic research of scholars affiliated to Adam Mickiewicz University.
On the website, there are available academic theses written by students and employees of the university. Most of the papers can be downloaded as PDF files. However, doctoral and habilitation theses can be accessed only by logging on computer stands of University Library in Poznań (Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Poznaniu).
Portal Czasopism Naukowych Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
“Scientific Journals Portal is a place of presentation, promotion and dissemination of high-quality scientific content. All journals adopted the portal are pre-reviewed and meet high international editorial requirements and the criteria of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Each journal has their own website and they are indexed in international databases. Research papers are presented separately within the specific issue of the journals. You can view either a single scientific articles, as well as whole numbers. Portal provides access to articles paid and free, varied depending on the journals, a specific number or date of publication. Many older scientific articles are available free of charge”.
For more specific research
Open Square Knowledge Without Boundaries
“Open Square is NYU Press’s platform for publishing and reading open access books. […] Open Square features new and recently published titles as well as a growing library of classic backlist publications”. The website includes e-books covering topics of culture, society, gender, feminism, sexuality as well as new political and social movements. Resources are catalogued by subjects.
CogPrints
CogPrints is “an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition”.
GeoRef
“The GeoRef database, established by the American Geosciences Institute in 1966, provides access to the geoscience literature of the world. […] The database contains over 3.9 million references to geoscience journal articles, books, maps, conference papers, reports and theses”.
In order to search materials on this platform, use the filter located on the left side of the website. In the section called “Availability” which is on the very bottom of the page, check any option except for “Available for purchase”.