Ungated Academic Articles
The prevalence of paywalls in academic publishing makes it difficult for many researchers in low income countries to access the latest journal articles in their field. Here are several options for accessing ungated articles. This list is only intended as a reference; the Mawazo Institute is not affiliated with any of these organisations.
INASP has written a useful primer on "identifying and using online research literature -- a guide for academics, researchers and students."
The Directory of Open Access Journals lets you search for articles which have been made available through Open Access.
The Directory of Open Access Repositories has a similar search function for articles in university repositories.
African Journals Online aggregates a range of journals on the continent, of which approximately half are Open Access.
The Social Science Research Network posts ungated working papers from a wide range of disciplines, including STEM fields.
The Public Library of Science offers a range of Open Access publications in STEM fields.
The arXiv is an online pre-print repository of articles in maths, physics, and computer science.
Excerpts of many academic texts are available in preview format through Google Books.
Unpaywall is an extension for Chrome and Firefox which identifies legal, ungated versions of academic articles.
H-Africa is a mailing list for scholars studying Africa across a range of disciplines. It can be a good resource for archival materials or data which are difficult to find elsewhere.
Africa Portal has over 5000 articles available on a wide range of topics, mostly drawing from think tanks and newspapers.