Open resources

Why this page exists

A university library is not a warehouse; it is a set of relationships. Halvorsen Library maintains a subscription collection, but a lot of what students and faculty use every day is open — free to read, reuse, and build on — and it is maintained by libraries, museums, governments, and nonprofits around the world. This page collects the open resources UW–Porter Falls relies on most, organized by what you are trying to do.

Everything here is real and free. Cite what you use and check each item’s license before you reuse it — a librarian can help.

Digital libraries & archives

When Halvorsen Library does not hold something, these are where it sends you first. All are free to read.

• Open Library — a page for every book ever published, with millions borrowable online (Internet Archive)
• Internet Archive — books, audio, video, software, and the web, archived and open
• HathiTrust Digital Library — a shared research library of digitized volumes from academic libraries
• Digital Public Library of America — photographs, manuscripts, and records from thousands of U.S. libraries and archives
• Project Gutenberg — 70,000+ public-domain e-books, carefully proofread
• Library of Congress — digitized collections, Chronicling America historical newspapers, and primary sources
• Smithsonian Open Access — millions of images and 3D models, released to the public domain
• Europeana — cultural heritage from museums, galleries, and archives across Europe
• Wikimedia Commons — freely reusable images, diagrams, and media

Open textbooks & courses

The course-materials estimate in your tuition is close to zero partly because faculty adopt open texts. Start here for a subject you want to preview or review.

• OpenStax — free, peer-reviewed college textbooks for high-enrollment courses
• Open Textbook Library — a reviewed catalog of open textbooks across disciplines
• LibreTexts — openly licensed textbooks and lab manuals, especially strong in the sciences
• OER Commons — a search engine for openly licensed teaching materials
• MIT OpenCourseWare — lecture notes, assignments, and exams from MIT courses
• Khan Academy — video lessons and practice from arithmetic through introductory college subjects
• Saylor Academy — free self-paced courses, some with low-cost credit-recommended exams

Open research & scholarship

For a literature review, a thesis, or just chasing a citation. Librarians can show you how to use these well.

• arXiv — preprints in physics, math, computer science, and related fields
• bioRxiv & medRxiv — preprints in the life and health sciences
• PubMed Central — a free full-text archive of biomedical and life-sciences literature
• Directory of Open Access Journals — a vetted index of quality open-access journals
• CORE — the world's largest aggregation of open-access research papers
• OpenAlex — an open index of scholarly works, authors, and institutions
• Semantic Scholar — AI-assisted search across scientific literature
• Unpaywall — a browser extension that finds legal free versions of paywalled papers
• Zenodo — a CERN-hosted repository for datasets, code, and papers, with DOIs
• Open Science Framework — project management, preregistration, and sharing for research
• ORCID — a free persistent identifier for researchers — set one up before your first publication

Open data

For a data-science project, a policy paper, an engineering estimate, or a capstone. Cite the source and check the license.

• Data.gov — the U.S. government's open-data catalog, across every agency
• U.S. Census Bureau — population, housing, economic, and geographic data
• Our World in Data — clean, well-documented datasets and charts on global development
• World Bank Open Data — development indicators for every country
• FRED — hundreds of thousands of economic time series from the St. Louis Fed
• NOAA / NCEI — weather, climate, and ocean data
• USGS EarthExplorer — satellite imagery, aerial photos, and elevation data
• Google Dataset Search — a search engine across public datasets on the open web
• Wisconsin Open Data — state and local datasets for Wesconsin

Free references & tools

Bookmark-worthy, used constantly in courses across the university.

• Purdue OWL — the standard free guide to citation styles and academic writing
• Cornell Legal Information Institute — free, authoritative U.S. law — statutes, regulations, and cases
• PubChem — a free chemistry database — structures, properties, safety, and literature
• PhET Interactive Simulations — free science and math simulations from CU Boulder
• Desmos — a free graphing and geometry calculator used in many math courses
• GeoGebra — free dynamic mathematics software
• OEIS — the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• MDN Web Docs — the reference for web technologies
• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative — the WCAG accessibility standards and how-to guidance
• QGIS — a free, open-source geographic information system
• GIMP — free, open-source image editing
• Blender — free, open-source 3D creation

For organizations: partner with the library

UW–Porter Falls believes access to knowledge should not depend on an institutional affiliation. If your library, archive, museum, publisher, or open-data project shares that view, the library would like to talk — about linking, about contributing metadata or digitized material, about hosting a mirror, or about a formal open-access agreement. Reach the Scholarly Communication librarian through the library.

(UW–Porter Falls is a fictional parody university and cannot actually enter agreements. The resources linked above are real; the invitation is not.)