Free Biomedical Literature Resources

Search citations to biomedical and life sciences articles dating from the 1950s to the present at PubMed.

Free full-text articles are available for selected PubMed citations. See a description of PubMed icons that indicate free text is available.
See these instructions to restrict your PubMed search results to free articles.
To search for free articles in PubMed by journal title, see this list of journals that provide some freely available full text via PubMed. Click on the links for a journal by year to search PubMed for free full text articles for the year and journal selected. More information can be found in the LinkOut program page.

PubMed Central is a growing digital archive of free biomedical and life sciences journal literature developed by NLM.

The Bookshelf is a growing collection of biomedical books that can be searched and read online.

Open access journals are available from the following sources*:
- Public Library of Science
- BioMed Central
- Directory of Open Access Journals (See "Health Sciences")

Your local medical library can also provide assistance with identifying and locating useful information free of charge.

*These are external sites not maintained by NLM

Last Reviewed: February 16, 2024