18 March 2020

Open-access ebooks platform Open Research Library

During the current extended quarantine period, library users are welcome to read books at home. 

You can access ebooks on social sciences and humanities via the open-access platform Open Research Library. This platform is aimed at providing libraries and scholars with greater opportunities to discover and use open-access content. 

It contains over 20,000 open-access ebooks on a variety of topics including architecture, arts, biographies and autobiographies, business and economy, comics, computer science, culinary, drama, design, photography, education, health, gardening, etc. This platform offers users the option to read ebooks online or download them in PDF format. One particularly convenient feature is the possibility to set up your account and to save your favourite books, group them by bookmarks, make notes, etc. 

This platform is run by the Knowledge Unlatched project. The project includes over 130 publishers, among them Amsterdam University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Brill Cambridge University Press, Duke University Press, De Gruyter, and SAGE Publishing, among many others. The goal of Knowledge Unlatched is to contribute to the further development of the Open Access infrastructure across the world by bringing together publishers and libraries.