We believe that a university education should not be a prerequisite for accessing scholarly works. Open Scholar was built to aggregate free and openly licensed academic books, making them discoverable through a clean, focused interface. We partner with the Google Books API to surface millions of previews, but we go further — we actively highlight texts that are fully downloadable, public domain, or openly accessible.

Our mission is threefold: 1) to reduce the friction between a researcher and the text, 2) to promote open educational resources (OER) alongside traditional monographs, and 3) to build a global community that values knowledge as a commons.

why “free” matters

In many parts of the world, journal subscriptions and book prices are prohibitive. Open Scholar indexes metadata from the Google Books corpus but also integrates open editions from sources like the Open Library, Project Gutenberg (where available), and institutional repositories. Every search result includes indicators if a free version exists. We are developing a “free filter” (coming soon).

Open Scholar launched in early 2024 as a response to the over‑commercialisation of academic search. We are a tiny team (two developers, one librarian, and a cohort of volunteers) who maintain this platform as a non‑profit project. We do not sell user data, we do not display ads, and we never will.

The platform uses the Google Books API under its free tier — we are grateful for that infrastructure. In the future we plan to incorporate additional open repositories (DOAB, OAPEN, arXiv) to make this the most comprehensive free academic search tool.

We respect copyright. The excerpts and cover images displayed are provided by the Google Books API and fall within fair use / fair dealing for the purpose of research discovery. If you are an author or publisher and believe a particular preview is unfair, please contact us and we will promptly review.

Your privacy: We only use the Google Analytics tag you consented to (gtag). No other trackers, no cookies for marketing. We do not log your searches or associate them with any identifier.

We welcome suggestions for new categories, reports of broken links, and ideas from educators. If you represent a library or an open access publisher, we’d love to discuss adding your catalog to our index.