Open and Free Access Materials for Research
The staff of the Institute have compiled a page to direct researchers towards freely accessible online research resources. We have included primary and secondary materials, including online text and media archives, and Open Access journals and books. While we have focused primarily on research resources, many of these may also be valuable for incorporating into research-led teaching and self-directed learning activities.
As indicated below, some of these have been made freely available or developed specifically in response to Covid-19, but the majority are permanent Open Access resources that will continue to be available in the future. While the list is not exhaustive and partly reflects the areas of expertise of current staff, it will be regularly updated and we welcome suggestions for further additions to the list, including those in or about other languages or geographic regions. Please write to ies@sas.ac.uk if you would like to recommend any other resources for inclusion.
About this Guide
How to use this guide
This webpage contains a selection of curated links to online research resources that can be used for historical research of all kinds. From digitised archives to oral histories, newspapers, maps and printed collections, we hope that there will some material that can help with your work or with supporting your students.
We have organised the material by period. This is always something of an arbitrary exercise, and there will be some duplication. Some key subject or perhaps unexpected formats have also been included, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (why not, for example, visit relevant historical sites around the world via Google Streetview?).
This is of course simply a small selection of the vast amount of material that is out there. You will know more about what is available in your own area of specialism, and Google, DuckDuckGo(Opens in new window) or Ecosia(Opens in new window) will uncover more. There are also numerous online guides and bibliographies, both general and specialised, that will give further suggestions, these include Wikipedia's list of digitised newspapers(Opens in new window). Your library will also be able to advise on what is available for you behind paywalls.
Some of the material has been selected by IHR librarians and colleagues in the institute, while others have been suggested by others. We are pleased to hear about suggestions, either by emailing ihr.library@sas.ac.uk or through a short online suggestions box(Opens in new window). The full spreadsheet of suggestions(Opens in new window) might also be useful to review and search.
Other School of Advanced Study and Senate House Library Guides
General Secondary Works
Books, Journals, and Institutional Repositories
- Access to Research (Open Access directory in partnership with publishers).
- Directory of Open Access Journals.
- JStor and ArtStor. JStor now offers individuals access to read 100 articles every 30 days.
- Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog Book search interface for more than hundreds of million books and serials in library and book trade catalogs worldwide.
- ProjectMuse is hosting a range of free materials, including UVA and University of Pennsylvania Press books and journals during the crisis.
- Details of university presses providing temporary access to their collections from PublicBooks.org.
- Open Library of the Humanities.
- Rian: Pathways to Irish Research Comprehensive libray of Irish Open Access Irish research publications.
- Unpaywall, OA Button and CORE Discovery plugins offer help in discovering open access versions of articles. See also the British Library guide to open access tools for research.
- Many publishers also provide access to some open access materials, such as Bloomsbury Academic and Cambridge Core.
Preprints and other open access collections can be also found in institutional repositories. A list of UK repositories can be found at Sherpa.