Access thousands of free publications

In line with its mission of knowledge sharing, UNESCO is responsible for transferring to society all its achievements and findings that foster social development. Through the Open Access Publications portal, UNESCO maintains its efforts to provide access to information to a broad public so that scientific knowledge the Organization produces can be useful to as many people as possible.

Many resources on literacy, gender, youth, environment, arts and other disciplines directly and indirectly related to development issues have specifically been made available online to use for free. These include books, journals, magazines, video presentations, data, and other forms of information.

As part of its new Open Access policy, UNESCO has adopted Creative Commons licenses, a global license suite that allows for free and open distribution of copyrighted works.

We encourage you to use these resources, subject to your compliance with the license terms as specified, as well as the practical tools designed to facilitate this use. The majority of resources are licensed under a CC BY SA license but some may be available under other terms, which will be clearly displayed. You should always verify the type of restricted license attached to the work that you are re-using. To have an overview of the used licenses, click here.

This portal will be regularly updated with new content, on this basis:

  • all new resources published by UNESCO on or after 1 July 2013 will be deposited in the Portal immediately after the official date of publication;
  • all resources published by UNESCO before 1 July 2013 will be progressively deposited in the Portal on a case by case basis;
  • all resources published by an external publisher will be deposited after an embargo period (12 months maximum).