Free access to scientific research and knowledge

Accessing scientific knowledge has two components:

• the first is being published and
• the second is finding what has been published.

The publication effort has costs, which are generally offset at the time of dissemination, by those who purchase the papers or subscriptions. Since most scientific research is publicly funded, it makes sense that it should be available to all citizens.

With the Internet, the cost of dissemination has become marginal and it is much cheaper to fund this dissemination directly rather than paying for each work. The Open Access - Accès libre movement has taken hold with the advent of the Internet. Large, wealthy scientific publishers are now focusing on value-added services.

Here are about 20 global scientific knowledge access services.

Thot Directory of Open Access Scientific Repositories

• ArXiv - Open access archive of over 2 million scientific papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, finance, statistics, electrical engineering, economics... Deposit yours.
  
  
• Base - Access to over 300 million documents from over 10,000 content providers, about 60% of which are open access. Interface in 8 languages.
  
  
• BMC - BioMedCentral - 250 open access journals in biology and medical sciences.
  
  
• DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals - Nearly 20,000 publications and more than 8 million articles listed.
  
  
• e-Lis - E-print in Library and Information Science - More than 24,000 documents specializing in literature management.
  
  
• HAL Open Science - More than 1.1 million open-access scholarly documents, 3.3 million references. Deposit yours.
  
  
• HAL Theses - More than 135,000 doctoral theses and habilitations to direct research (HDR) from universities in France.
  
  
• IntechOpen - Publisher of open access scientific books - 6,300 open access scientific books. Accepted and peer-reviewed submissions.
  
  
• Isidore - Direct access to more than 10 million humanities and social sciences documents. In French.
  
  
• Jurn - Compiles publications from over 4,000 electronic journals in the arts and humanities. Direct access to each publication from their list.
  
  
• OpenDOAR - Lists all scholarly repositories. Search by repository title or by country. Great.
  
  
• Open Edition - Portal to electronic resources in the humanities and social sciences. In French. 13797 books, 610 journals.
  
  
• PMC - PubMedCentral - Free full-text archive of biomedical and life science journal literature from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM) of the National Institutes of Health.
  
  
• ResearchGate - Search for documents but more importantly a social network of 20 million researchers. Dynamic.
  
  
• Sci-Hub - 88 million articles sucked from scientific sites. A powerful parallel tool for accessing science. If you have the exact reference, you can find the work

PDF documents

• Academia - 40 million free access .pdf documents. Deposit yours.
  
  
• Free Full pdf - Free scientific publications in .pdf format
  

Other tools that find documents, but not necessarily open access

1. Google Scholar - Search for scientific papers. If it's been published somewhere, it should be there.
   
   
2. Mendeley - References on 100 million articles.

Illustration: DepositPhotos - marketing.lasers