E-book platforms compile academic and reference books that are freely available for study and research. They include scholarly monographs, edited volumes, classic works, and textbooks across disciplines, serving as essential resources for students and researchers.
| DATABASE | INTRODUCTION | TYPE OF DOCUMENTS AVAILABLE |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | Books |
| HathiTrust Digital Library | HathiTrust provides access to millions of digitized books, including many in the social sciences. Many books are available in full text for free, especially older works. | Books |
| Project Gutenberg | Project Gutenberg is an online library of more than 75,000 free eBooks. It is a volunteer-driven project aimed at digitizing, proofreading, archiving, and distributing literary works (especially those in the public domain) in electronic form. Project Gutenberg offers multiple formats: plain text, HTML, EPUB, and more, to support different devices. You can read online or download the eBooks and then transfer them to your device (tablet, phone, e-reader). | Books |
| Open Research Library | The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 14,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone. | Books |
| Open Humanities Press | OHP is an international community of scholars, editors, and readers, working in critical and cultural theory. It began in 2006 as a volunteer-led initiative, operating independently to promote open access in the humanities via journals, books, and experimentation with new scholarly communication forms. The journals and books on OHP are published under open access, meaning there are no fees charged either for reading or for authors to publish. Despite being open access, all publications go through standard peer review and editorial assessment. | Books, Journals |
| University of California Press Open Access | UC Press has a program to publish books and journals under open access (free to read by anyone, immediately upon publication). UC Press publishes bold, forward-thinking titles in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, all of which undergo a vigorous peer review process. | Books |
| IntechOpen Social Sciences Collection | IntechOpen is a global open access (OA) publisher, especially known for publishing open access books, in the fields of science, technology, and medicine (STM). IntechOpen has published thousands of peer-reviewed OA books. For example, as of recent data, more than 7,100 open access books are available via the platform. These books span several domains: Physical Sciences, Engineering & Technology; Life Sciences; Health Sciences; Social Sciences & Humanities. | Books, Journals |
| UCL Press Open Access Books | UCL Press is a pioneering publisher of high-quality Open Access books and journals. Building on UCL’s global reputation for scholarly excellence, UCL Press is disrupting traditional academic publishing by ensuring widespread dissemination of research worldwide, free to download online. Their commitment to making a digital version of every UCL Press publication available for free at the point of use ensures that researchers, teachers, learners and public citizens can access authoritative, peer-reviewed publications with no geographical, institutional or financial limitations. | Books |
| Cambridge University Press | Cambridge University Press is the academic and Bibles publisher of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Their internationally renowned books and journals, products and services support learning, teaching and research across higher education. | Books, Journals |
| Taylor & Francis | They have published over 180,000 book titles, in a wide range of disciplines across six imprints and 75 subjects. They are also a leading digital publisher with over 100,000 eBooks available. They are one of the world’s largest publishers of open access research. | Books |
| JSTOR Open Access Books | JSTOR offers open access (OA) e-books, which are ebooks you can access free of charge for anyone—libraries or individual users. These books are DRM-free; you can download PDFs of chapters, print them, etc., without restrictive digital rights management. JSTOR has over 13,000 OA ebooks from 145+ publishers. | Books, Journals |
| Project MUSE | Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books, journals, and digital humanities works from several distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These materials are freely available to libraries and users around the world. | Books, Journals, Case studies |
