Below is a list of 25 open access databases. Each database has a search engine you can use to see what sources are in it. As a student, you can access these databases for free. Some search engines, like Google Scholar, you can just use. Others, marked with a star (*), require you to create a user id and password before you can use them.
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Quality research publications from Africa
AGRICOLA *
Over 6 million records encompassing all aspects of agriculture and allied discipline.
arXiv e-Print Archive
2,044,253 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics from Cornell University
Bartleby Reference Works
Reference works such as dictionary, thesaurus, etc.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).
BioMed Central
187 peer-reviewed open access journals.
Business Journals *
1.25 million American business news articles published since 1996.
Digital Library of the Commons
Free and open access to full-text articles, papers, and dissertations from Indiana University.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
EBSCO Essentials *
Free access to journals from a leading online database.
ECONBIZ
Journals, working papers & conferences in business studies and economics.
Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
Comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.
Encyclopedia.com
200,000 brief entries from the Britannica, Oxford University Press, and Columbia Encyclopedia.
Google Scholar
Scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
JURN
Millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses in Arts, Humanities, Business, Law, Nature, Science, and Medical.
Medknow
Peer-reviewed, online and print-plus-online journals in medicine.
O*NET OnLine
Comprehensive database of worker attributes and job characteristics.
Paperity
The first multi-disciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers that gives readers easy and unconstrained access to thousands of journals from hundreds of disciplines.
Project GutenbergLibrary of over 60,000 free eBooks.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
A nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
PubMed Central (PMC)
Over 7.8 million medical articles from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
ScienceOpen
Open access to more than 28 million articles in all areas of science.
Semantic Scholar
AI-powered research tool for scientific literature
Social Sciences Research Network
1,101,790 research papers from 810,118 researchers in more than 65 disciplines.
Zenodo
Database of open-access articles named after Zenodotus, the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history.
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* Some of these databases require users to register for a free user id.