STEM - Free and Open Access Resources for Research

This guide will help you locate open access/freely available databases, ebooks, and journal articles for your STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) research. If you are a UC San Diego student, please use our general STEM research guide to see what licensed resources we have available..

Remote access to electronic resources licensed by the library (databases, journals, ebooks) is restricted to current UC San Diego faculty, as per our license agreements with vendors and publishers, nor can we sell or grant access to anyone outside these groups. While members of the public can use most of these licensed resources within the library for non-commercial, educational, or personal research purposes, that is not available right now while the Library is closed due to COVID..

However, an increasing number of STEM research sources are not paywalled, and therefore accessible to the public.

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.