Skip to Main Content
University of Texas University of Texas Libraries

Chemistry

Free Resources

What's free to use for everyone?

unlock iconMost of the databases and journals of greatest interest to chemistry researchers are behind expensive paywalls, including SciFinder, Reaxys, and over 90% of primary journals.  That means you need to be currently affiliated with a subscribing institution in order to use them.  (Sorry, alumni don't qualify.)  While there's a growing trend to make more research and data open and freely available to everyone, at present the chemical literature is far more closed than open.

Here's a list of some of the most important resources that alumni and the general public can use for free.  In addition, many of the specialized web resources listed in the guide pages to the left are also free.

Chemistry Databases

Literature Search

Locating Open Papers

Just because a paper is published in a subscription journal doesn't mean that there's no free version of it lurking out there somewhere.  See our Where to Find...Articles page for tricks to locate legal versions of papers that aren't behind paywalls:  preprints, accepted deposited manuscripts, postprints, and more.

Open Educational Resources in Chemistry

More Information:

More Info

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.