Oxford LibGuides: Biology: Free Online Resources

Free online resources

General Biology

Royal Society of Biology
The Royal Society of Biology is a single unified voice for biology: advising Government and influencing policy; advancing education and professional development; supporting our members, and engaging and encouraging public interest in the life sciences. The Society represents a diverse membership of individuals, learned societies and other organisations.
Linnean Society
The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active society devoted to natural history.
The Society for Experimental Biology (SEB)
The Society for Experimental Biology is a learned society that was established in 1923 at Birkbeck College in London to "promote the art and science of experimental biology in all its branches".

Plant Sciences

Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI)
BSBI promotes the study of botany in Britain, Ireland, the Channel Isles and the Isle of Man.
Association of Applied Biologists (AAB)
A learned society and charitable organisation devoted to applied biological sciences including plant physiology, plant pathology and soil biology.

Zoology

Zoological Society of London (ZSL)
The Zoological Society of London is an animal conservation charity undertaking scientific investigation via the Institute of Zoology.

A great deal of scientific information is freely available on the internet. Using the web for academic research requires you to adopt a critical attitude to the material you find. Always think about who is writing the material and for what purpose, how old it is, if the material is biased in any way, and consider if information is properly referenced to peer-reviewed academic sources that you can check independently.

RADAR Framework
The RADAR framework is a set of principles you can use to help evaluate the quality and reliability of information you find on the web (and elsewhere). This guide from the University of Utah provides a helpful summary of how and why to apply RADAR.
WorldWideScience.org
WorldWideScience allows you to search for a range of scientific research outputs such as papers, software, data sets and multimedia content available on the internet. It is maintained by US Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers.

Department of Biology
Website for the Oxford University Department of Biology.
Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCru)
Website for the Oxford Zoology based WildCru unit covering their conservation work and research activity.
Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (EGI)
Website for the EGI based in the Oxford Department of Zoology covering their research activities in ornithology.
Oxford University Herbaria
The herbaria in the Department of Plant Sciences preserve thousands of plant specimens and conducts extensive scientific research into plant systematics and taxonomy.
Oxford University Botanic Garden and Arboretum
Oxford Botanic Garden is the UK’s oldest botanic garden and occupies a world-class position in terms of its history and academic location.
CBRG
The Computational Biology Research Group is based at Oxford and provides the University with a range of bioinformatics resources and support services.

General Biology

Encyclopedia of Life
A free resource containing articles on many species of plants, animals and microorganisms.
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The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an international effort, led by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, to raise awareness and understanding of living nature by providing free, open, multilingual, digital access to trusted information on all known species.
Darwin Online
Publications, manuscripts and other material related to the life and work of Charles Darwin.
Cell Image Library
This library is a public and easily accessible resource database of images, videos, and animations of cells, capturing a wide diversity of organisms, cell types, and cellular processes.
IUCN Red LIst
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources list of threatened and endangered species.
NCBI Taxonomy Browser
The Taxonomy Database is a curated classification and nomenclature for all of the organisms in the NCBI public sequence databases. This currently represents about 10% of the described species of life on the planet.
BRENDA - The comprehensive enzyme information system
BRENDA is the main collection of enzyme functional data available to the scientific community. It is available free of charge via the internet

Plant Sciences

Kew Data and Digital Resources
Includes the following databases:
- Library catalogue
- Herbarium catalogue
- Economic Botany
HEIR
The Historic Environment Image Resource includes digitised images from slide collections stored around Oxford University. The collection includes a number of slides from a collection of Plant Sciences glass slides held in the Radcliffe Science Library.

Zoology

Animal Diversity Web
The Animal Diversity Web is an online database and encyclopedia of animal natural history, built through contributions from students, photographers, and many others.
The Human Protein Atlas
The Human Protein Atlas is a Swedish-based program initiated in 2003 with the aim to map all the human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs using an integration of various omics technologies, including antibody-based imaging, mass spectrometry-based proteomics, transcriptomics, and systems biology. All the data in the knowledge resource is open access to allow scientists both in academia and industry to freely access the data for exploration of the human proteome.

Biology: Free Online Resources

Introduction

Free online resources

General Biology

Plant Sciences

Zoology

General Biology

Plant Sciences

Zoology

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