WOW!--Full Text AND Free?!!

WOW!--Full Text AND Free?!!
An Internet Hotlist on Finding Free Full Text Articles, Books, and Multimedia Content

created by Robert J. Lackie
Rider University Libraries

Introduction | Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text Articles | Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text Books | Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text and Multimedia Content | Website Author's Information

Introduction
In addition to using books and magazines to find out about Web directories and search engines providing free, full text articles, books, and multimedia content, doesn't it make sense to also use all libraries' resources combined with the power of the Internet itself? The annotated links below will get you moving in the right direction!

Also, in case you did not already know, 'Alexa.com computes Website traffic rankings.....by analyzing three months of aggregated historical traffic data from the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users).” I have included some Alexa traffic ranking for the resources on the Website. The lower the rank/number, the higher the traffic to that site (i.e., the rank of Google is 2 in the world and has been keeping a traffic rank of 2 or 3 for basically the last 15 months, and my own Website, RobertLackie.com is ranked 1,807,073, which is up from 3 million about 15 months ago (I just don’t understand why my site is not ranked as high as Google, Yahoo!, or Librarian Internet Index....hmmm, oh well! ;) Enjoy!

The Internet Resources

Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text Articles

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - Launched in May 2003, Sweden's Lund University Libraries Head Office hosts this 'one-stop shopping' open access directory, providing no-cost access to the full text of over 3,300 journals, with about 1,146 journals searchable on the article level (over 183,300 articles available)--in the science and humanities/social sciences--and its directory is continually growing in size. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 58,623 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa ranks this site as 67,780 in the world.
FindArticles at BNET.com - The FindArticles database is an updated replacement of their original free, searchable article Web archive, with the current service now searching millions of articles from leading academic, industry, and general interest publications. You can differentiate between free articles and premium, and you can also explore publications by various topics, as well as view the most popular articles and the most popular publications. Alexa Internet gave this site a traffic rank of 1,189 in the world as of mid-May 2007, and now Alexa gives it a rank of 952 in mid-May 2008.
Free Medical Journals - This site, 'created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet [without advertising]' was established by Bernd Sebastian Kamps, Director of the International Amedeo Literature Service and editor of Influenza Report in 2006 and HIV Medicine in 2005. His site lists medical journals that are free now and those that are free 1-6 months after publication, as well as those free one year and two years after publication. You may browse by title (in English or several other languages listed) or by specialty area. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 127,048 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 156,353 in the world.
Google Scholar - 'Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.' Alexa Internet does not rank Google Scholar separately from the main Google site, which it does give a traffic rank of 3 in the world as of September 2007, the same as it was in May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa ranks this site as 2 in the world.
HighWire Press - 'A division of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press hosts the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1152 journals and 4,764,273 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made 1,881,530 articles free. With our partner publishers we produce 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals.' I like how it also provides quick full-text access to your institution's journal subscriptions to HighWire-affiliated journals via IP address recognition when using a computer workstation within your library/institution--journals to which you probably did not even know that you had access! (click on 'My Highwire' tab at the top, scroll down to 'My Access,' and click on the link under 'My Institution's Subscriptions.' You can also browse by topic, title, or publisher under the 'For Institutions' tab--you will be impressed! Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 1,192 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 1,049 in the world.
MagPortal.com - MagPortal.com is another site for finding freely available magazine articles on the Web, using keyword searching or category browsing methods. Indexing close to 200 magazines, their focused content allows them to update with new articles within days of them becoming available. The material is of good quality, and their Hot Neuron Similarity software package allows them to measure the similarity between articles, linking similar articles to each other. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 107,778 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alex gives this site a rank of 132,894 in the world.
OAIster - From the University of Michigan and a part of their 'Digital Library Production Service' project, OAIster allows us to search or browse over 15 million records from over 950 contributors, and most are free. Their goal?: 'To create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources [i.e., e-books, e-journals, and audio files, images, & movies] that are easily searchable by anyone.' 'OAIster can be searched by Title, Author/Creator, Subject, Language or Entire Record. Searches can also be limited by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset) and sorted by title, author, date and hit frequency. Results allow further limiting by data contributor (i.e., where the record was harvested from).' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 2,063 in the world as of mid-May 2007, with a very large drop in visits, apparently, with a rank as of mid-September of 955,414--I am surprised about this, but I believe it is just because not many people have been blogging about this site, specifically, lately. It is a valuable resource site that deserves more attention. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 1,072,881 in the world.
PubMed Central - 'PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature [providing free, full text articles from 300+ journals] at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM).' Alexa Internet does not rank PMC separately from the NCBI site, which it does give a traffic rank of 301 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 320 in the world.
arXiv - Providing open access to over 476,700 e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, and quantitative biology, 'arXiv is an e-print service....whose contents 'conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated and funded by Cornell University (and also partially funded by the NSF). Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 21,496 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 11,530 in the world.

Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text Books

Amazon.com's 'Search Inside the Book' - 'Search Inside!™ is a feature offered by Amazon where you can search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. The previous Amazon search ('Look Inside') displayed books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords matched your search terms. But with Search Inside!, search results will include titles based on every word inside the book.' To be fair to publishers and authors who participate in their program, Amazon only allows 'Search Inside!' users to read a portion of the book online. Alexa Internet does not rank Amazon Search Inside! Search Subscriptions separately from the main Amazon site, which it does give a traffic rank of 31 in mid-September 2007, which is about the same as it was in mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 28 in the world.
Bookshelf - Bookshelf is a 'growing collection of [full text] biomedical books (50+) that can be searched directly,' brought to us by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Like PMC above, Alexa Internet does not rank Bookshelf separately from the NCBI site, which it does give a traffic rank of 301 in the world as of mid-May 2007 and of 399 as of mid-September 2007, a moderate decrease in traffic rank in 5 months. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 320 in the world.
Google Book Search - 'Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Book Search (formerly Google Print) aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily--right in your Google search results.' There is a Google Book Search 'Partners Program' (aimed at publishers) and a 'Libraries Project' underway. Alexa Internet does not rank Google Book Search separately from the Google site, which, again, it does give a traffic rank of 3 in the world as of mid-September 2007, no change from mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 2 in the world.
International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) - ICDL is a 'public library for the world's children.' Read over 1,900 free children's books online that are written in 37 different languages!. 'We are a library that provides free access to children's books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.' The ICDL selects, collects, digitizes, and organizes children's materials in their original languages and creates appropriate technologies for access and use by children 3-13 years old. '[Their] users come from 166 different countries.' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 493,433 in the world as of mid-May 2007 and of 425,558 in the world as of mid-September 2007, indicating a considerable increase in traffic in 5 months. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 465,834 in the world.
OpenDOAR - A major component of the open access infrastructure, OpenDOAR (the Directory of Open Access Repositories) was set up to provide a 'dependable listing of the academic e-print research repositories that are available world-wide, to underpin the outreach of the Open Access movement.' Here, you can search or browse from any country, on any content type, on any subject. 'Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.' 'OpenDOAR is being developed and maintained by the University of Nottingham as part of a portfolio of work in Open Access and repositories under the SHERPA umbrella. OpenDOAR was started and initially developed by the University of Nottingham, UK and Lund University, Sweden.' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 1,141,495 in the world as of mid-May 2007, decreasing to 1,422,012 as of mid-September 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 1,086,374 in the world.
Project Gutenberg Free eBook Library - Michael Hart's 'Project Gutenberg' is 'the oldest producer of free electronic books on the Internet,' comprising of 25,000+ pre-1923 'literary works that are in the public domain in the United States.' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 6,025 in the world as of mid-September 2007, down a bit from 4,729 in mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 4,333 in the world.
The National Academies Press (NAP)'s 'Open Book' - 'The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health....Hundreds of these books can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book, while others are available for purchase.' Their main pages state that they you can 'Read more than 3,600 books online FREE! More than 1000 PDFs now available for sale.' They also have a small number of Transportation Research Board (TRB) published books available for free download (chapter and/or book) and you can search more than 1,500 TRB full-text electronic publications. Alexa Internet gives this site, nap.edu only (not just the Online Book project separately), a traffic rank of 32,302 in the world as of mid-September 2007, down quite a bit from its rank of 20,512 in mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 17,141 in the world, which is a very good improvement from mid-September 2007.
The Online Books Page - John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania's Online Book Page has 30,000+ works. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 2,652 in the world as of mid-May 2007, with a decrease in traffic rank to 3,485 as of mid-September 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 2,237 in the world.
The Open Library - 'The Open Library website was created by the Internet Archive to demonstrate a way that books can be represented online. The vision is to create free web access to important book collections from around the world. Books are scanned and then offered in an easy-to-use interface for free reading online. If they're in the public domain, the books can be downloaded, shared and printed for free. They can also be printed for a nominal fee by a third party, who will bind and mail the book to you. The books are always FREE to read at the Open Library website.' The newest demo site is now available as of September 2007 at http://demo.openlibrary.org/ although it is a 'soft launch' with the real launch occurring in October. So, check out this demo site and the original site (openlibrary.org) and you will see why I like how the interface allows you to turn the pages and some books even offer an audio button next to the pages to be played of the content on the pages. Although their collection wasn't very large, their collection is growing 'featuring 13,439,320 books (including 234,857 with full-text)' and not all have audio available. For those that don't have audio they accept submissions. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 392,666 in the world as of mid-May 2007, while in mid-September the traffic rank was listed as 72,185--a huge increase in 5 months! Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 92, 629 in the world.

Directories / Search Engines for Free Full Text and Multimedia Content

E-LIS - This open access archive for library & information science and related areas contains over 7,600 documents. 'E-LIS relies on the voluntary work of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and is non-commercial. It is not a funded project of an organization. It is community-owned and community-driven. It is the first international e-server in this subject area and resulted from the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) project and the DoIS (Documents in Information Science), promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and hosted by AEPIC team on machines of the Italian Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per Elaborazione Automatica (CILEA).' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 101,200 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 100, 134 in the world.
SciELO - This Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) is an open access 'model for cooperative electronic publishing of scientific journals on the Internet. Especially conceived to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries.' Right now, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Cuba, Spain, and Venezuela have contributing sites and this SciELO.org portal integrates and provide access to their network, hoping to 'overcome the phenomena known as 'lost science'.' There are new initiatives in development constantly and currently those include Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Uruguay, and West Indian Medical Journal. Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 116,111 in the world as of mid-May 2007. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 81,474 in the world.
The Internet Archive - The Internet Archive (IA) is widely known for its 'Wayback Machine' service, allowing us to 'visit archived versions of Web sites' by typing in a URL. However, IA offers so much more, such as Web content, moving images, live music, audio, and text archive. They truly are 'building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, (they) provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 213 in the world as of mid-May 2007; in mid-September 2007, the traffic rank from Alexa was listed as 271. Currently, mid-May 2008, Alexa gives this site a rank of 291 in the world.
The Open Content Alliance - 'The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.' Alexa Internet gives this site a traffic rank of 965,549 in the world as of mid-May 2007 and 1,098,353 as of mid-September 2007, a considerable decrease in traffic rank in five months--but I believe this will reverse soon when the OCA gets more publicity later this year. Currently, mid-May 2008, it has had further decline in Alexa with a rank of 1,183,585 in the world.

Website Author's Information

Prof. Robert J. Lackie's Personal/Professional Website - Robert J. Lackie is an Associate Professor-Librarian at Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where he co-leads the Franklin F. Moore Library's Instruction Program and serves as Library Liaison to the Communication, Teacher Education, and Graduate Education & Human Services Departments. He received his Master of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina and his Master of Arts in Curriculum, Instruction, & Supervision at Rider University. In June 2006, Robert received the 'American Library Association Ken Haycock Award for Promoting Librarianship' and was selected for inclusion into Who’s Who in America and Who's Who in American Education [http://www.marquiswhoswho.net/robertjonathanlackie/]. For more detailed information on Robert's 2008 seminars/workshops, his curriculum vitae, short biography, presentations, publications, etc., follow the above link.

Content by Robert J. Lackie, rlackie@rider.edu
http://www.kn.att.com/wired/fil/pages/listfindingro1.html
Last revised Sat May 31 14:33:22 US/Pacific 2008