By Eric Brand

I recently found yet another treasure trove of online resources for Chinese medicine research. I discovered this batch because I was originally looking at some photos of authenticated medicinals in the online specimen database of Hong Kong Baptist University, which is basically a collection of images from my teacher Dr. Zhao Zhongzhen's herbal museum in Hong Kong. The specimen database is a great find on its own, but I also just discovered that HKBU's library system has some phenomenal links to a mind-blowing range of articles. For example, this link to Pubmed contains a huge repository of articles from 2006-2010, and most of the articles have free links to the full text version. Clicking here will take you to a section of HKBU's online library that contains links to a great list of open access online journal articles related to Chinese medicine.

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Yet another great link to free, full-text online research articles can be found here, and another neat link (this one is mostly highly technical plant science) can be found here. One of my favorite articles of the day is this piece on ginseng, which is short but fascinating.

Finally, in case you haven't heard, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and many other top universities have started putting video recordings of many of their classes online. For free! Talk about a serious contribution to the world. You can now effectively audit any number of classes in virtually any discipline for free from anywhere on the planet. Here is a link to a site that directs the reader to a variety of online resources for free classes, and searching on iTunes will also yield a staggering number of hits for online classes (just search for Stanford, etc).