As the costs of accessing academic journals increases, even the largests universities in the world are facing challenges covering these costs. At the same time, there is a growing body of open-access journals and articles that are available for consultation free of charge. In this section, we list a few of these:

* DOAJ: the Directory of Open Access Journals.
* OpenDOAR: the Directory of Open Access Repositories.
* DOAB: the Directory of Open Access Books.
* Google Scholar, where some results include a link to a free PDF.
* The Open Access Button.
* Social networking sites which focus on paper sharing, such as academia.edu or researchgate.net
* JURN: a free and no-ad online search tool for the finding and downloading of free full-text scholarly works.

Adapted from a post from MetaFilter (see here).

For users of Firefox and Chrome, the Unpaywall extension (see here) legally finds whether an article available in paid journals is available elsewhere available for free.