Navigating Open Access Databases
Open Access Databases
Open Access databases are freely accessible to the public without any subscription requirements.
AATA Online
AATA Online is a comprehensive database of over 120,000 abstracts of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage. AATA now includes selected subject-specific bibliographies produced as part of the Getty Conservation Institute's own conservation and scientific research projects or as part of specific collaborative projects in which the Institute is involved.
BASE
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
DMOZ or ODP
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The ODP is also known as DMOZ, an acronym for Directory Mozilla. This name reflects its loose association with Netscape's Mozilla project, an Open Source browser initiative.
Espacenet Worldwide Patents
Espacenet offers free access to more than 80 million patent documents worldwide, containing information about inventions and technical developments from 1836 to today.The starting date varies greatly by country, with the earliest being 1836 for the United States. The availability of any given field also varies greatly by county and time period. For example, only about 50% of the patents have a title field and only 33% have an English abstract. We recommend you consult the http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/ before beginning your search.
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PubChem
PubChem, released in 2004, provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. PubChem is organized as three linked databases within the NCBI's Entrez information retrieval system. These are PubChem Substance, PubChem Compound, and PubChem BioAssay. PubChem also provides a fast chemical structure similarity search tool. More information about using each component database may be found using the links in the homepage. This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.
PubMed
PubMed comprises more than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. The National Library of Medicine produces MEDLINE, the premier bibliographic database covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. The PubMed database provides free of charge access to all MEDLINE citations; in-process citations (PreMEDLINE); out-of-scope citations from MEDLINE journals; and citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing.Users of PubMed can also register for MyNCBI, which allows for: Saving Searches (save search strategies to get updates - including automatic e-mailed updates), setting up filters to group your retrieval by topics of interest to you, and save useful citations. To register for MyNCBI, go to the PubMed main search page and select Register from the MyNCBI box located at the top right hand side of the page.
Social Science Research Network
eLibrary DatabaseThe SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 542,600 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 445,100 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications.
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 10.1 million records: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and arXiv e-prints.
