LibGuides: Science and Technology free sites: Home

Welcome

Alums and members of the community regularly ask if it is possible to arrange for the same kind of off-campus access as is held by those currently affiliated with UT-Austin --- no, it is not.

Nor have we found an organization to join that offers the kind of library access you'd like to have. We offer good access to subscription sources if you can come to campus; however, getting set up for that access is complicated. Some information is here and it is a good idea to talk with staff before you make a special trip.

Otherwise, here are suggestions of freely available options. Some are always a first choice and some are work-arounds. See the Free Resources page of the Access the Library After Graduation Guide for information about other subject areas.

Some Basics

Public Library Holdings

In Texas, public libraries are usually part of the TexShare community, providing access to a set of excellent databases, including full-text for many articles.

Academic Search Complete and
Business Source Complete

are good databases for STEM content.

Always Available

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Library staff prefer "library databases" because of their sophisticated features but Google Scholar can be a helpful index to research papers and it is available.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.
Google Book Search This link opens in a new window
Always a great tool for finding books since you can search the text. Sometimes you can get all you need from the preview.
Updated daily. Searches complete text of books from selected library collections and publishers. Search works just like a regular Google search -- when book content contains a match for selected search terms, Google provides links to it in the search results. Depending on a few factors, Google displays everything from a few short excerpts to the entire book.

Each book includes an "About this book" page with basic bibliographic data like title, author, publication date, length and subject. For some books, additional information like key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles and a list of related books.

From the Libraries Databases List

The list of library Databases includes many freely available databases. The list may be sorted in various ways. The Open Access "type" may be used alone or with a "subject" to find options.

Of note for STEM research:

arXiv.org This link opens in a new window
For physics and related fields.
Created by Paul Ginsparg at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico and launched in 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. Areas covered include physics and related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational linguistics, and neuroscience.
ChemRxiv This link opens in a new window
Preprints of chemistry research papers.
A cooperative venture of ACS, RSC, and GDCh, launched in 2017. All ChemRxiv preprints are indexed in SciFinder.
Explore Census Data This link opens in a new window
Demographic and related information from the Census office.
Updated regularly. Provides population, housing, industry, economic, and geographic data and maps from the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
NIST Chemistry WebBook This link opens in a new window
Chemical and physical property data.
Updated regularly. Provides users with easy access to reliable chemical and physical property data (thermochemical, thermophysical, and ion energetics) for chemical species. The data provided in the site are from collections maintained by the NIST Standard Reference Data Program and outside contributors. Data in the WebBook system are organized by chemical species.
OSTI.GOV This link opens in a new window
Indexing and much full text for research from the Department of Energy.
Updated regularly. Provides bibliographic and full text access to the Department of Energy (DOE) research and development reports in physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics.
Texas ScholarWorks This link opens in a new window
Publications from the UT community.
Updated regularly. Holds digital works and provides related services that constitute an institutional repository for the University of Texas at Austin. Archives and provides persistent and reliable access to the digital works of faculty, staff, and students and aims to provide the greatest possible dissemination and recognition to these works as possible. Digital works include research and scholarship, as well as works that reflect the intellectual and service environment of the campus.
TRID: The TRIS and ITRD Database This link opens in a new window
Indexes the research literature of transportation research and transportation engineering. Only some full-text.
TRID is an integrated database that combines the records from the TRB’s Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database. TRID provides access to more than one million records of transportation research worldwide.
WorldCat.org This link opens in a new window
The freely-available version of WorldCat-OCLC. Verify publications and find which libraries own the title.
Updated continually. Provides access to the world's most comprehensive bibliography, with over 49 million bibliographic records for audio-visual materials, books, maps, musical scores, newspapers, and periodicals in 370 languages and covering information from 4,000 years of knowledge. Many of the holdings for materials at the University of Texas Libraries are included, as well as holdings for other libraries in Texas, the United States and worldwide.

There are some databases that the UT-Austin Libraries have in a different form. These should not ask for credentials, though full-text will only be supplied if it is open-access. Here is one example:

IEEE Xplore Digital Library
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is the major society for electrical and computer engineering, with interdisciplinary research reaching into many other areas.

Also:

engrxiv
Publishes, "two major types of article: (1) Preprints of articles in parallel to traditional journal submissions. (2) Previously published articles that you wish to make Open Access."