Finding free stuff for the sciences...

Yesterday I posted a few widgets you can grab from various government sources. But what about actual research-type content?

Well, once again government-hosted sites can be a great source.

Take the sciences, for example -

• Science.gov is one spot to start. Divided into 36+ databases, it searches millions of pages of U.S. government science info. It's also helpfully divided into categories by topic, which can speed up the search process if you know what you're after.
  
• PubMed Central is a fantastic source for biomedical and life sciences journal articles. It's free, full text, and contains articles (over 1,500,000) from over 450 journals.
• NCBI - the National Center for Biotechnology Information - has a central search interface for multiple databases relating to genetics, molecular processes, and all sorts of molecular biology information.

Not finding what you want? Try the private sector for more free possibilities.

• Public Library of Science. PLoS is a non-profit organization made up of scientists and doctors working to make medical infomation & literature available to the public. Everything they publish is free and openly available (thus the "open access").

That barely scratches the surface, of course. If you're looking for more, HighWire Press has a list of free science resources, and their related lists key (on the same page) will also prove helpful for researchers.