Finding Materials Online Beyond Harvard Library

Some excellent databases of full-text materials are available on the internet. Online access can vary by country. Some sites are invisible in some countries, while other sites may have a great deal of material but will restrict full text according to the country's copyright law. 

• Many universities now maintain open-access repositories of research produced by their affiliates; Harvard's is called DASH.
•  Google Scholar and Google Books provide full-text searching of thousands of articles, books and web sites. Material which is in the public domain (not protected by copyright) tends to to be freely accessible.
• HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive are also good places to find a vast collection of online materials. As in Google Books, most full text is pre-1924, but full text searching- useful for deciding whether or not something is useful- is available for copyrighted material in these databases.  

Other ways to locate current scholarly articles:

• Many school libraries now offer curated selections of e-resources for alumni. 
• Directory of Open Access Journals or JURN (arts and humanities). 
• New York Public Library's "The Research Library" can lead you to open access resources as well.
• You can now access articles from the excellent JSTOR database through their "My JSTOR" program which allows anyone to freely read, but not copy or download, up to three articles every two weeks.

Don't underestimate public libraries! Most large public library systems will provide some free online access to their members. For specifics, contact your local or regional public library.