books
DOAB (Open Access Books)
The book counterpart to DOAJ: a directory of peer-reviewed open-access academic books, numbering around 95,000 titles. Its catalogue is searchable through a keyless interface and is also browsable on the web. Turn to it when you need scholarly monographs and edited volumes that are free to read.
Why it’s useful & how it works
DOAB is the standard destination for open-access academic monographs: all listed books have been peer-reviewed and are free to download. It draws from over 700 publishers across more than 85 languages, making it especially useful when you need a scholarly book in a language other than English. You search directly on the DOAB website by keyword, author, publisher, or subject, and each result links to the full text hosted by the publisher or OAPEN.
What’s inside
Over 95,000 peer-reviewed open-access books and chapters from more than 700 academic publishers, spanning every scholarly discipline.
API access
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Responded HTTP 200 398 ms
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Cloudflare challenge HTTP 403 662 ms (just a moment)
- API, direct
- Responded HTTP 200 1.9 s
- API, through a proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 2.3 s
Did a real search return anything?
Returned results · 100 results for the sample query · median 1.7 s · stable across runs
Sample query: Particle Physics Reference Library
Benchmark coverage
Found 5 of 8 test items (63%) in the Books cluster. Median response 245 ms.
By how well known the item is: 3/3 well-known, 2/3 mid, 0/2 obscure .
One item it found: Bride of Frankenstein
Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).