STEM - Free & Open Access Resources

Remote access to electronic resources licensed by the library (databases, journals, ebooks) is restricted to current UC San Diego faculty, students and staff, as per our license agreements with vendors and publishers, nor can we sell or grant access to anyone outside these groups. Members of the public can use most of these licensed resources within the library for non-commercial, educational, or personal research purposes, but only on our public workstation computers. These are not accessible on the UCSD guest wifi network.

This guide will help you locate open access/freely available databases, ebooks, and journal articles for your STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) research. These are available to anyone, whether or not you are affiliated with a university.

If you are a UC San Diego student, please use our general STEM research guide to see what licensed resources we have available, or explore our subject guides.

Other options to consider:

• Some professional societies include a number of free articles and/or database searches as part of the membership benefits, including student memberships. For example
  • IEEE
  • ACS
  • AAAS
  • ACM
     
• Contact the author. 
  • Each article should include contact information for at least one of the authors. While there is no guarantee that the author will respond, some publishers do provide authors with a way to share their article with individuals who would like a copy.