Open Access, Open Education, and Copyright

Open Educational Resources are diverse and hosted in many different places. Consequentially not all OER are easy to find, as they are not all aggregated in one central location under the same standards - as the demand for OER grows so do sources of OER. It can be confusing - and a lot of work to find the right resources for your class. This module presents some options to get you started on your search.

Remember, if at any time you would like assistance finding resources, your librarians can help. Reach out to your liaison and let them know what you are looking for.  If possible, provide a copy of your current or proposed syllabus. 

Finding Open Textbooks
When you’re starting to look for open textbooks, start small. If you know about an open textbook provider in your particular subject area, or a smaller curated collection that may have a textbook for your course, start there instead of searching through a larger index or database. For example, check out these smaller collections:

OpenStax -Peer-reviewed and free to use. Subjects include Math, Science, Social Sciences, and Humanities.
LibreTexts - The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty, and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
NOBA Project (Psychology) - Noba is a free online platform that provides high-quality, flexibly structured textbooks and educational materials. These textbooks and materials are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License. Users may reuse, redistribute, and remix the content to suit their needs.
American Institute of Mathematics: Approved Textbooks - AIM approves open-source mathematics textbooks if they can serve as the primary text in a mainstream mathematics course at the undergraduate level in U.S. colleges and universities
Open Textbook Library - Free to use and download textbook site supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Education Network. Subjects include Accounting, Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics, Social Sciences, and more.
BCCampus Open Ed - The B.C. Open Textbook Collection is home to a growing selection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties. Discover open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty, meet accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).

If you are not finding what you need in the smaller collections, you can search through some of the larger OER aggregators:

OASIS OER Search Tool - OASIS is an easy-to-use search tool developed and curated by a dedicated OER team at SUNY Geneseo. Within OASIS, narrow your search by subject by clicking Advanced Search, or do a basic search and narrow the list by subject on the left side of the search results page.

Merlot - California State University System-supported OER search tool for books, course materials, lesson plans, and more.

OER Commons - Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) launched this digital public library of OER in 2007, and it includes over 50,000 items from full university courses to open textbooks.  Alabama has their own "hub" on OER Commons that is managed by the Alabama Virtual Library (Links to an external site.).

Mason OER Metafinder (George Mason University) - the Metafinder is a search engine that looks in 21 different sources of OER materials. The Metafinder searches OER Commons, OpenStax, and MERLOT, but also searches places like HathiTrust, Digital Public Library (DPLA), and the internet archive.  This can help you find not just standard OER but also materials that are in the public domain.

Jillian Maynard, a librarian at the University of Hartford, has developed some short (3-4 minute) videos that will walk you through how to search OpenStax, Open Textbook Library, OASIS, and the Mason Metafinder.  You can find those videos here 

Some text adapted from Affordable Learning Georgia's Finding Free and Open Resources shared under  a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How can I find Creative Commons-licensed resources (images & videos)?

There are a few different ways you can search for CC items to use in your class materials.

• CC Search Browser Extension - An open-source plugin that can be installed and used by anyone to search for CC-licensed images, download them, and attribute the owner/creator.  You can filter by license type or website.  You can get one-click attributions in rich text or HTML for use in your OER
• CC Image Search - A robust search engine that will help you locate images both in the public domain and under CC licenses.  You can search by keyword, or browse collections from places like the Brooklyn Museum, The Met, and Flickr 
• CC Videos - You can find these in a variety of ways, but here are step-by-step instructions for two of the major video aggregators:
  • YouTube - In the search bar at the top of the page, enter your keywords.  When your search results are displayed, filter your results - there is an option under "features" for Creative Commons.  As with any search, you need to verify the information is accurate.
  • Vimeo - In the search bar at the top of the page. enter your keywords.  When your search results are displayed, filter (you have to select +more filters at the bottom of the left column. You will see a filter for licenses and the various CC licenses are selectable. As with any search you need to verify the information is accurate.

Some text adapted from Affordable Learning Georgia's Finding Free and Open Resources shared under  a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.