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National Institute of Teaching: access to library resources

A guide for National Institute of Teaching (NIoT) students.

About open resources and databases

A number of resources are openly available to the public and are free to access, including teaching, learning or research materials. Although they may be free to access their use may come with licensing conditions describing how the content can be (re)used. Users should ensure they read and respect the terms and conditions associated with any individual resources.

Open resources and databases: a useful list

Arts

Please see the Research section below for this curriculum area.

English, Maths and Science

American Prison Newspapers

American Prison Newspapers brings together hundreds of newspapers published within prisons by incarcerated people over the past 200 years. When complete, the collection will contain newspapers from prisons in every state, representing penal institutions of all kinds, including women-only institutions.

AMS Open Math Notes

AMS Open Math Notes is a repository of freely downloadable mathematical works in progress, hosted by the American Mathematical Society as a service to researchers, teachers, and students.

ArXiv.org

arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology, and statistics. The contents of arXiv conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned, operated, and funded by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution.

BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource

This is the new home for the BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource. Play over 900 programmes from the BBC’s archive of Shakespeare’s plays, poems and sonnets. Please register for access to the Archive. The Archive is only accessible to users based in the UK.

Humanities

Historical Data UK

Historical Data UK is a joint project between the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Bank of England. Via a new free-to access online repository, the project aims to make historical economic statistics more readily available to researchers and the general public.

Women Also Know Law

Women Also Know Law offers a searchable database of women and non-binary people who have academic appointments in law (or who are seeking academic appointments in law). The database is publicly available for everyone to use, including conference organizers, syllabi authors, casebook editors, journalists, and whoever may be looking to find someone with academic expertise in law. And our social media feed celebrates the accomplishments, expertise, and knowledge of women in the law.

Languages

Please see the Research section below for this curriculum area.

PE

Please see the Research section below for this curriculum area.

Technology, Computer Science, Art and Design

Please see the Research section below for this curriculum area.

Research

Cite Black Women

It takes a village to organize a movement. The Cite Black Women Collective is our team of visionaries that drives the Cite Black Women movement out front and behind the scenes.

CORE

CORE provides free and seamless access to millions of research articles aggregated from thousands of Open Access data providers, such as repositories and journals.

DART-Europe E-these Portal

DART Europe provides a single access point for the discovery of electronic theses and dissertations from within Europe. It provides bibliographic details of c. 400,000 theses from 27 European countries and around 540 European universities.

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

The DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher's website or repository.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The 'one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals'. DOAJ contains around 6,300 journals from more than 110 countries in more than 50 languages. More than 2,500 journals are providing metadata on article level, which means that more than 500,000 articles are searchable from DOAJ. These are quality-controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available. RSS feeds are available to see what new journals are added.

Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS)

EThOS offers a one-stop shop for all UK doctoral theses to read the full text or to request the digitisation of a thesis. The system can be searched by keywords, authors, institution, and dates to identify the existence of a thesis. You need to register to be able to download the full text of a thesis or request it for digitisation. Some charges may apply. There is an online ordering and tracking system.

Get The Research

Find and understand peer-reviewed research papers. Get The Research is a free search engine that helps people find and understand papers in the Unpaywall database.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches academic publishers, professional societies, and pre-print archives. Abstracts are available with full text dependent on institutional subscriptions. The material includes citation data, cited by features which link to items known to Google Scholar that cite the original paper.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a complete snapshot of all web pages on every website since 1996. Since the average lifetime of a page on the Internet is 100 days, this snapshot is retaken every two months. The Internet Archive at the BA includes the web collection of 1996 through 2007. It represents about 1.5 petabytes of data stored on 880 computers. The entire collection is available for free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. This historic collection is invaluable to scholars trying to understand the interactions between people and events.

See also its mirror site, the Wayback Machine.

OAPEN

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer-reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.

Open Access Button

Open Access Button provides free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors. Sources include all of the aggregated repositories in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors' personal pages.

Open Access Directory (OAD)

OAD is list of OA disciplinary repositories (also called central or subject repositories). This list includes both preprint and postprint repositories.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD)

OATD indexes open access postgraduate theses and dissertations from electronic repositories around the world. It includes details of over 1.8 million theses from over 800 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

Openstax

Openstax provides high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are free online.

PDQT Open: Open Access Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest)

PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. You can locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for you to enjoy.

Registry of Open Access Repositories

The Registry provides links to Open Access archives. They can be searched by content. The content covers full-text of either preprints, postprints of peer-reviewed journal articles, or dissertations.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall provides Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories.

Women Also Know Stuff

Search the Women Also Know Stuff database for relevant experts when you are writing syllabi, planning conferences, organizing panels, selecting speakers, citing research, inviting essays and op-eds, and identifying expert sources.

Women Leading in AI

Women Leading in AI brings together female thinkers, scientists, academics, businesswomen and politicians to influence the future of AI.

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