Finding Free Full Text Materials

• Full Text Health Science/Medical Journals
• Books
• Full Text Materials Not Solely About Health Sciences
• Other Places to Look

Full Text Health Science/Medical Journals

• PubMed Central
  PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
• Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ)
  Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that provides access to quality controlled Open Access Journals. Searches can be conducted using the journal title, ISSN, dates, author, keyword, and words located within the abstracts or all fields. Access to certain journals may change based upon agreements with publishers.
• Free Medical Journals (FMJ)
  FMJ offers 430 research journals predominately in English. There is not a search function but journal titles can be browsed alphabetically or by subject specialty. The site includes information about when popular subscription journals will release their material for free. Access to certain journals may change based upon agreements with publishers.
• Public Library of Science (PLoS)
  PLoS provides full text, peer reviewed, and scientific or medical research articles in various subject areas. Articles are current and PLoS has created several journals to group similar content together. Searching can be conducted by keyword or by advanced searching. Information chaining is utilized in articles so you can click on an author’s name to retrieve other articles written by them. Also identified within PLoS articles are links to articles not provided by PLoS that are available for free from other sources.
• BioMed Central
  BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. BioMed Central's portfolio of 196 journals includes general titles alongside specialist journals that focus on particular disciplines.
• Medscape - Provided by WebMD
  Medscape offers over 130 full text medical journal articles. The content available from each journal ranges from a few articles, a single issue, or several years of full journal access. You must register, which is free, to search the journal holdings. Journals are listed in alphabetical order and searching can only be performed with keywords, no advanced searching is available. Articles are presented over numerous pages, and some citations do not lead directly to the article. To locate some articles, you will have to keep the citation retrieved in the search or browse, and then click a link to be transferred to another site, and then navigate through or enter the citation to find the article.
• Highwire Press Stanford University
  Offers over 2 million free full text journal articles related to science and medicine. Journals are listed alphabetically and show the range date for content available. Searching can be performed by keyword, with a citation or advanced methods. The site is regularly updated and contains information about future releases.
• medIND - Indian Medlars Center
  Indian full text biomedical journals. Journals are listed alphabetically and searching can be performed by keywords. You can combine a search within IndMED with PubMed using their search tool.
• OpenMED@NIC
  OpenMED@NIC is a discipline based International Archive. It accepts peer-reviewed documents having relevance to research in Medical and Allied Sciences including Bio-Medical, Medical Informatics, Dental, Nursing and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
• Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research
  This portal offers 66 medical subject areas to browse for journals. The majority of the journals are published in English but a few are in other European languages. Searching is dependent on the journal’s site and there is not a central searching method for all of the journal holdings through this site. The site also offers separate listings for French, Spanish, German and Italian language medical journals.
• SciELO.org - Scientific Electronic Library Online
  Offers scientific research journals published in Spanish and Portuguese. Journals are listed alphabetically, by country of origin and by subject area. The web site’s main page is in English but most of the information about the journals is in Spanish. An option for English translation of journal information is available and abstracts are also provided in English but the majority of articles are in Spanish.
• eMedicine - Provided by WebMD
  Described as an open access medical textbook, over 6,500 articles are provided. You have to register, which is free, to search. Several different options for searching are available in the advanced search feature. You can search for words, images, subject areas or combinations of various search fields.
• Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)
  JMIR is a peer reviewed, open access journal which focuses on health consumer informatics and the usage of the Internet in health care for research and communication. Searching can be done by keyword, author, title, abstract and index terms and publication date.

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Free Books

• NCBI Bookshelf
  These electronic books can be accessed from specific chapters or sections, it is more like an electronic journal in the ability to search it and go to a specific area rather than scrolling through the whole book to reach the part that is needed. Searching can be conducted the same way you would search PubMed. Also, links within PubMed articles are linked to the NCBI books so you can use information chaining, and the books are also linked to PubMed articles. Books and new features will be added as they become available as this service is evolving.
• Free Books 4 Doctors
  Created and maintained by the same organization as Free Medical Journals. Like FMJ, the web site has the same interface and searching is not provided. The books are listed in alphabetical order and by subject specialty. This site offers books in several languages other than English.

Full Text Materials Not Solely About Health Sciences

• Project Gutenberg
  This project currently has over 33,000 books available for free. Searching can be done by author or keywords or an advanced searching can be done. Advanced searching will be most effective in searching for health science/medical books since there is an option for Library of Congress Classification categories which you can choose from. Browsing can be done alphabetically by author or title. Also offered in this site are other forms of free material such as data, music files, pictures, movies and audio books.

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Other Places to Look

• Search MEDLINE/PubMed.
  • Individual articles will be marked with Free article
  • You can also select Free Full Text from within the Filter your results box on the upper right of the results page.
• Use Google Advanced Search or Google Scholar.
• Go to a journal’s homepage as sometimes there are free copies of a journal or articles.
• Check your local public library’s online databases.

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