General Research Links

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg offers over 54,000 free eBooks: Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, especially older works for which copyright has expired. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.


The Internet Archive

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.


Encyclopedia Britannica

Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images.


Dictionary of the History of Ideas

On behalf of the Directors and Board of Editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas, we are pleased to make available, through digitization, a valuable reference work produced in an earlier generation by a remarkably talented group of scholars. Authors who contributed articles to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas include Isaiah Berlin, George Boas, Herbert Butterfield, Merle Curti, Mircea Eliade, Joan Kelly Gadol, Sidney Hook, Milton Konvitz, Leonard Kreiger, Judith Shklar, Peter N. Stearns, and René Wellek. The editor of the Dictionary was Philip P. Wiener, who was also for many years editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. Current JHI Editors and Contributing Editors who wrote for the DHI include Robert M. Kingdon, Helen North, Jerrold E. Seigel, and John W. Yolton.

Published in its original edition in 1973-74 and last reprinted in 1977-1980, the Dictionary of the History of Ideas was a culminating work in a tradition that had been energized by the fight against fascism. It was a tradition committed to the pursuit of disinterested scholarship in the academic sphere and to free expression of thought in the political sphere (as in Arnaldo Momigliano’s article “Freedom of Speech in Antiquity”). Among reviewers, F. E. L. Priestley called the Dictionary “monumental,” noting the “impressive list of 254 contributors, drawn from a world-wide range of institutions,” and Roy Porter remarked on its “conceptual richness,” “authoritativeness,” and “originality.” Peter Gay, anticipating another, different style of research, perceptively suggested that “the cultural history of the future toward which our profession is now aiming will have to embrace both thinker and demagogue, poet and peasant, the writer and the reader of newspaper articles.”


Khan Academy

Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. We tackle math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more. Our math missions guide learners from kindergarten to calculus using state-of-the-art, adaptive technology that identifies strengths and learning gaps. We’ve also partnered with institutions like NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT to offer specialized content.


Five Books

Here at Five Books, we have asked well over 1,000 authors, academics and public figures to recommend the best five books in their field – and to explain their choices in an interview.


Open Library

Our goal is to provide a page on the web for every book ever published. At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you’re looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell’s where you can purchase your own copy.


Global Grey eBooks

Download free eBooks in PDF, epub, and Kindle formats. Browse Global Grey’s growing library of high-quality, public domain, free eBooks. No registration needed, no sign ups, no hoops to jump through. Just find a book you want, click on the download link, and that’s it! Currently, Global Grey has over 2,400 free eBooks ranging from classic literature to occult books, psychology, folklore, and everything in-between.


Loeb Classical Library

The mission of the Loeb Classical Library, founded by James Loeb in 1911, has always been to make Greek and Latin literature accessible to the broadest range of readers. The digital Loeb Classical Library extends this mission into the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press is honored to renew James Loeb’s vision of accessibility and presents an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing, virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature. Epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; those Church Fathers who made particular use of pagan culture — in short, our entire Greek and Latin Classical heritage is represented here with up-to-date texts and accurate English translations. More than 520 volumes of Latin, Greek, and English texts are available in a modern and elegant interface, allowing readers to browse, search, bookmark, annotate, and share content with ease.


Loebolus Collection

Loebolus is based on Edwin Donnelly’s “Downloebables”, aiming to make all the public domain Loebs more easily downloadable by re-hosting the PDF’s directly, without the need to enter CAPTCHA’s.

You can also download a .zip containing all 277 PDF’s (3.2GB). Or view the code used for generating this site on GitHub.


Perseus Digital Library

Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world. For the mission of Perseus and its current research, see here.

Perseus maintains a web site that showcases collections and services developed as a part of our research efforts over the years. The code for the digital library system and many of the collections that we have developed are now available. For more information, please go here.
Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.


New Books Network

The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing scholars and other serious writers to a wide public via new media. Covering 90+ subjects, disciplines, and genres, we publish 55 episodes every week and serve a large, worldwide audience. The NBN is staffed by Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Marshall Poe, and Co-Editor Leann Wilson.


Cambridge Core

Cambridge Core is the home of academic content from Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core is the place to find valuable, useful and inspirational research and academic information. With over 1.6 million journal articles and 36,000+ books, Cambridge Core is the central destination for academic research.


Full Text Archive

Full text books – archive of free books, texts, documents, classic literature, drama and poetry. All books free to read online.


OER Commons

OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum. The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. This shift in educational practice is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation. Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning content through engaging educators in new participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning.


Open Textbook Library

Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 684 textbooks, with more being added all the time.

The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.


Directory of Open Access Journals

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

DOAJ operates an education and outreach program across the globe, focussing on improving the quality of applications submitted.


Journal of the History of Ideas

Since its inception in 1940, the Journal of the History of Ideas has served as a medium for the publication of research in intellectual history that is of common interest to scholars and students in a wide range of fields. It is committed to encouraging diversity in regional coverage, chronological range, and methodological approaches. JHI defines intellectual history expansively and ecumenically, including the histories of philosophy, of literature and the arts, of the natural and social sciences, of religion, and of political thought. It also encourages scholarship at the intersections of cultural and intellectual history — for example, the history of the book and of visual culture.


Literary Hub

Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life. There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost—with the help of its editorial partners, Lit Hub is a site readers can rely on for smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books. Each day—alongside original content and exclusive excerpts—Literary Hub is proud to showcase an editorial feature from one of its many partners from across the literary spectrum: publishers big and small, journals, bookstores, and non-profits.


Springer Link

Providing researchers with access to millions of scientific documents from journals, books, series, protocols, reference works and proceedings.


Library Genesis

Library Genesis or LibGen is a search engine for articles and books on various topics, which allows free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. Among others, it carries PDFs of content from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect web-portal.


Humanities for All

Humanities for All showcases over 1,500 examples of publicly engaged humanities work at colleges and universities across the United States.

Explore how publicly engaged humanities work advances scholarship and enriches American life.


NYU Digital Library Technology Services

NYU Digital Library Technology Services (DLTS) processes, enables access to and preserves digital materials that come from both the NYU community and from collaborating partner organizations. Our methods include digitization, software development, research, project coordination and the articulation of best practices. DLTS creates infrastructure and systems to advance networked scholarly communication and explores the questions raised by the use of these services as they continue to evolve.


Open Logic Project

The Open Logic Project is a collection of teaching materials on mathematical logic aimed at a non-mathematical audience, intended for use in advanced logic courses as taught in many philosophy departments. It is open-source: you can download the LaTeX code. It is open: you’re free to change it whichever way you like, and share your changes. It is collaborative: a team of people is working on it, using the GitHub platform, and we welcome contributions and feedback. And it is written with configurability in mind.


The Online Books Page

Listing over 3 million free books on the Web. Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom.


Modern Library

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. For decades, young Americans cut their intellectual teeth on Modern Library books. The series shaped their tastes, educated them, provided them with a window on the world. Many of the country’s celebrated writers are quick to attest that they grew up with the Modern Library.


Sci-Hub

The first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers. A research paper is a special publication written by scientists to be read by other researchers. Papers are primary sources necessary for research – for example, they contain detailed description of new results and experiments.


Project Muse

Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery.


Scribd

In addition to making the best membership book service around, we’ve also built the world’s most popular open platform for publishing and sharing documents of all kinds. To date, people all over the world have shared more than 60 million documents via Scribd, from landmark court filings to business presentations to academic papers from scholars around the world.


Planet Publish

Planet Publish caters to anyone and everyone with an interest in eBooks – the books themselves have been taken from our very own Planet PDF website which caters for professional Web or print publishers seeking appropriate tools, to rank beginners wondering exactly what “PDF” stands for.


Z-Library

Z-Library is one of the largest online libraries in the world that contains over 6,640,000 books and 80,760,000 articles. We aim to make literature accessible to everyone.


ResearchGate

Advance your research. Discover scientific knowledge, and make your research visible.


JSTOR

JSTOR provides access to more than 10 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.


WikiBooks

Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks. Wikibooks is for textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course, or for self-learning.


WikiSource

The free library that anyone can improve. 386,849 texts in English.


Loyal Books

Previously named “Books Should Be Free”, Loyal Books offers 7,000+ free public domain audiobooks and ebooks.


Open Syllabus Project

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching and learning applications. The OSP helps instructors develop classes, libraries manage collections, and presses develop books. It supports students and lifelong learners in their exploration of topics and fields. It creates incentives for faculty to improve teaching materials and to use open licenses. It supports work on aligning higher education with job market needs and on making student mobility easier. It also challenges faculty and universities to work together to steward this important data resource.


LibreTexts

The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.


OpenStax

OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to give every student the tools they need to be successful in the classroom. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource companies, we’re breaking down the most common barriers to learning. Because we believe that a well-educated society profits us all.


BCcampus OpenEd Resources

Search for quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats; the first step in adopting open educational resources. Search by subject and download them to your computer.


Rebus Community

We are a global community working together to create and share Open Educational Resources (OER). Here you’ll find people, processes, and tools to support your publishing efforts.


Chinese Text Project

The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.


Forgotten Books

Forgotten Books is a London-based book publisher specializing in the restoration of old books, both fiction and non-fiction.

“Today we have 1,271,513 books available to read online, download as ebooks, or purchase in print.”


Sites Linking or Containing Digital Books