Open Access E-Resources: Free and Downloadable
E-resources have been categorized as per type of content. Click on the titles below to access the respective e-resources:
(A) All-in-One E-Content:(E-journals, e-books, audio books and interactive e-content):
1. National Digital Library of India (NDLI) (MHRD-Govt. of India and IIT-Kharagpur Initiative) (5,02,53,589 items hosted as of 29-August-2020)
2. NDLI COVID-19 Research Resources Repository – Single window access to various types of COVID-19 Research Resources on NDLI website
3. eShodhSindhu – Online Resources for supporting Researchers in COVID-19 situation: Research material, educational course material as a support for students, research scholars and academics and to support educational institutions during this challenging time of COVID-19.
4. COVID-19 Information Portal by EBSCO – An ‘Open Access Initiative’of EBSCO that provides information about trending topics, maps and data visualisations, global news, and journal updates about COVID-19.
5. National Science Digital Library (Developed by CSIR-NISCAIR)
6. Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. (20 million books, 4.5 million audio recordings, 4 million videos, and much more)
7. LoyalBooks – Free Public Domain Audiobooks & eBook Downloads
(B) Open Access E-Books:
1. DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books): 29,872 Academic peer-reviewed books from 393 publishers
2. Digital Library of India (Project funded by the Govt. of India.) (38,280 books in PDF format)
3. IntechOpen – 4,800 Open Access E-Books for the Scientists by the Scientists
4. OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) -The OAPEN Library contains 36,000 freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
5. Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks.
6. ManyBooks: Ultimate guide to free e-books, offers more than 50,000 ebooks to be discovered!
7. HathiTrust Digital Library: HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
8. PDF Drive – PDF Drive is a search engine for PDF files. As of 03-09-2020, there are 84,552,812 eBooks for you to download for free.
9. OpenStax – Free, flexible, peer-reviewed Textbooks available in convenient formats for students (Science, humanities, social sciences, commerce, etc.)
10. Open Textbook Library – Textbooks every student can access and afford. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality.
11. Free Book Notes – An aggregate literary resources of over 53,000 books
12. Free-eBooks.net – Thousands of free books to read whenever and wherever you like!
13. FreeTechBooks – Database of Free, Open Access Online Computer Science books, Textbooks, and Lecture Notes
14. Commons Open Educational Resources – OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources.
15. Bookyards – Library to the world – Over 24,000 eBooks freely available
16. Folger Shakespeare Library – Read full texts of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, poems online or download for free!
17. ई साहित्य प्रतिष्ठान – Online Marathi eBooks
18. महाराष्ट्र राज्य साहित्य आणि संस्कृती मंडळ – मराठी ई-बुक डाऊनलोड
19. ई–पुस्तकालय – Online Marathi and Hindi Books
20. हिंदी BooksPDF.com – Website for Hindi E-Books download
21. 44Books.com – More than 8300 Hindi books available for download
22. e-Balbharati: Std. XII (HSC) – Downloadable E-Books of Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education.
(C) Open Access Books for Users with Visually Challenged and Low Vision Disabilities:
1. Sugamya Pustakalay – A collection of over 6,53,234 books accessible to the visually challenged, people with low vision or to persons with any other print disability, this library of libraries is your one-stop shop.
(D) Open Access Audio Books:
1. LibriVox: A library of around 14,000 audio books freely available on the internet in the public domain
2. Open Culture: 1,000 free Audio Books Downloadeable
(E) Open Access E-Journals:
1. DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
2. NISCAIR e-journals (18 Titles)
3. NISCAIR Online Periodicals Repository (NOPR) (22 Titles)
4. Indian Academy of Sciences Resources (11 Titles)
5. Elsevier Open Access Journals (554 Titles)
6. OMICS International Open Access Scholarly Journals (700+ Titles)
7. Science Direct Open Access Journals (2,471 Titles)
8. SpringerOpen Journals (228 Titles)
9. Wiley Open Access Journals (77 Titles)
10. Scientific Research Publishing (200+ Titles)
11. Oxford University Press – Oxford Open (42 Titles)
12. PLOS – Public Library of Science (8 Titles)
13. Taylor & Francis Open and Routledge Open (4,557 Titles)
(F) Open Access Databases:
1. Legal Information Institute of India – Free, Independent and Non-Profit Access to 159 Databases of India Law
2. India Environment Portal by Centre for Science and Environment: Over 4,00,000 contextual, curated, cross-tagged specialised research reports and government documents on environment
3. ScienceOpen: A freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context, a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it.
4. BASE- Bielefeld Academic Search Engine: World’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources, BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. 60% of the indexed documents can be accessed for free.
5. CORE: The world’s largest database collection of open access research papers (19,52,37,188). The Open University, UK & JISC Initiative
6. Microsoft Academic: ‘Research more, search less’ from 235,438,149 publications, 48,859 journals, 740,623 topics, and 25,719 institutions.
7. ResearchGate: ‘Discover Research’ – Access over 135 million publication pages and stay up to date with what’s happening in your field
8. Academia: Join 126,175,288 Academics and Researchers, Academia is the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free.
(G) Open Access Datasets:
1. Kaggle datasets: Offers all the code & data needed to do data science work. Over 19,000 public datasets and 200,000 public notebooks available.
2. Scientific Data: Scientific Data is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets, and research that advances the sharing and reuse of scientific data. All content is hosted on nature.com
3. OpenML: An open, collaborative, frictionless, automated machine learning environment with Datasets, automatically analyzed, annotated, and organized online.
4. Quandl: The premier source for financial, economic, and alternative datasets, serving investment professionals.
(H) Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Repositories
1. Shodhganga – Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET – 2,60,000 + Ph.D. Theses deposited by Research Scholars from Universities across India
2. ShodhGangotri – Repository of Indian Research in Progress @ INFLIBNET – Repository of more than 7,600 Synopses / Research Proposals for Ph.D. Programmes
3. ETD of Indian Institute of Science – Digital repository of Theses and Dissertations of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
4. Open Access Theses and Dissertations – 5,091,822 Open access theses and dissertations published around the world.
5. Ethos: E-Theses Online Service from British Library, provides search to over 500,000 doctoral theses. Download instantly for your research.
6. OpenThesis: A free repository of theses, dissertations, and other academic documents, coupled with powerful search, organization, and collaboration tools.
7. DART-Europe E-Theses Portal: Access to 828,729 open access research Theses from 619 Universities in 28 European countries
8. EBSCO Open Dissertations: A collaboration between EBSCO and BiblioLabs that brings an innovative approach to increasing traffic and discoverability of ETD research and making searching thousands of open dissertations possible.
(I) Open Access Knowledge & Institutional Repositories:
1. World Bank Open Knowledge Repository– The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. (30,073 publications available)
2. Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR): database of 56,980 full texts and steadily growing holdings of freely available, full-text social science documents.
3. Indian Academy of Sciences Fellows Publications – Open Access Repository of publications of Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences
(J) Open Access Rare Books and Manuscripts:
1. Rare Book Room – Rare Books Online from across the globe
2. Abhilekh Patal (National Archives of India): Portal for access to archives and learning – 70,844 Digitised records and 27,60,969 digitised pages, as of 19-May-2020
3. Bharatiya Kriti Sampada (National Mission for Manuscripts): Developed by Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India – A database of all Indian manuscripts in the country and abroad. Access to 23,40,000 e-documents
4. Indian Manuscripts: Indian Antique Books and Manuscripts, ancient documents, palm leaf manuscripts, tamrapatra, etc. – More than 1,50,000 e-pages of original ancient Indian Scripts.
5. Rare Book Society of India: A virtual space for rare book collectors and history buffs to read, discuss, rediscover and download lost books.
6. Gita Supersite: Developed by IIT Kanpur, has a treasure of Shrimad Bhagwadgita, Ramcharitmanas, Brahma Sutra, Upanishads, etc. with translations
(K) Open Access E-Content (Videos, Tutorials, Interactive Content):
1. e-PG Pathshala: A Gateway to all PG Courses – High quality, curriculum-based, interactive content in different subjects across all disciplines
2. e-Pathshala of NCERT: Access digital textbooks and eResources useful for Std. XI and Std.XII
3. Vidya-Mitra: Integrated E-Content Portal – Project of MHRD-Govt. of India & INFLIBNET – e-Text, Videos, e-Tutorials for UG & PG Students
4. SWAYAM-PRABHA- Free DTH Channels for Education: Project of MHRD-Govt. of India & INFLIBNET – 32 DTH Channels telecasting of high-quality educational programmes on 24X7 basis
5. CEC-UGC Edusat: Consortium for Education Communication from UGC: A YouTube Channel of The Consortium for Educational Communication popularly known as CEC is one of the Inter University Centres set up by the University Grants Commission of India.
(L) E-Learning Courses Platforms:
1. SWAYAM: (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) SWAYAM is a programme initiated by Government of India. Courses delivered through SWAYAM are available free of cost to the learners, however learners wanting a SWAYAM certificate should register for the final proctored exams that come at a fee and attend in-person at designated centres on specified dates.
2. UGC MOOCs: A Vertical of SWAYAM
3. NPTEL: (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) A Project funded by the MHRD, Govt. of India
4. Coursera: Build skills with courses, certificates, and degrees online from world-class universities and companies
5. edX: Access 2500+ Online Courses from 140 Institutions – internationally reputed and recognised.
6. FutureLearn: Get access to high quality learning wherever you are, with online courses, programs and degrees created by leading universities, business schools and specialist organisations.
7. Udemy: The world’s largest selection of courses, choose from over 100,000 online video courses with new additions published every month
8. Unacademy: Enroll in courses and watch lessons from India’s best educators, on India’s largest learning platform
9. Khan Academy: A non-profit organization with the mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere … for every student.
(M) Resources for UPSC and MPSC Examinations:
1. Union Public Service Commission – Official Website – Information about UPSC, notifications of all UPSC examinations, Online applications, recruitment, admit cards, etc.
2. Previous Years UPSC Exam Question Papers – Question Papers for different UPSC Examinations available on the official website of UPSC
3. Maharashtra Public Service Commission – Official Website – Information about all MPSC Examinations, Syllabus, recruitment, etc.
4. Previous Years MPSC Exam Question Papers – Question Papers for different MPSC Examinations available on the official website of MPSC
(N) Resources for Olympiad Examinations
1. Question Papers and Solutions in Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics