Oxford University Press Gives You Free Access to Books, Dictionaries & More During National Library Week

It’s Nation­al Library Week, and to cel­e­brate Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press is mak­ing many of its online resources free for users in the U.S. and Cana­da this week. Access will be open until the end of Sat­ur­day, the 19th. You will be able to read Oxford’s online dic­tio­nar­ies, online schol­ar­ly edi­tions, exten­sive ref­er­ence mate­ri­als, and the pop­u­lar series of Very Short Intro­duc­tions, which “offer con­cise intro­duc­tions to a diverse range of sub­ject areas from Cli­mate to Con­scious­ness, Game The­o­ry to Ancient War­fare, Pri­va­cy to Islam­ic His­to­ry, Eco­nom­ics to Lit­er­ary The­o­ry.” (To access the texts, type “library­week” as the user­name and pass­word in the Sub­scriber Login area. It appears halfway down the page, on the left.)

The open access peri­od excludes Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press schol­ar­ly jour­nals. This is unfor­tu­nate. As you prob­a­bly know, most of the research pub­lished by uni­ver­si­ty press­es resides behind pro­hib­i­tive pay­walls that make it dif­fi­cult for inde­pen­dent schol­ars and laypeo­ple to read cur­rent schol­ar­ship. It would be nice to see Oxford and oth­er press­es make such grace peri­ods more fre­quent and inclu­sive in the future. But for now, OUP’s open access week is a great way to entice non-pro­fes­sion­als into aca­d­e­m­ic schol­ar­ship and tem­porar­i­ly ease the bur­den on those with­out reg­u­lar access to their data­bas­es. Vis­it Oxford’s site and sign in with user­name and pass­word “library­week” to begin read­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness