Open Educational Resources (OER)

List of sources for eBooks in the public domain.

This article has an extensive list of excellent sources of public domain works.

BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

Source for scholarly open articles.

Open and low-cost alternative teaching materials to textbooks.

Find content you can share, use and remix

Directory of sites that use Creative Commons licensing; organized by media type: audio, video, image, text, other.

Over 1200 academic, peer-reviewed books from over 30 publishers representing a variety of different disciplines.

Searchable links to free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals organized by category. The aim of DOAJ is to cover a wide range of subjects and languages. There are currently 5925 journals that are available in the directory and 2481 that are searchable at the article level. There are 488970 articles available on DOAJ in which 20% are peer reviewed articles.

Searches dozens of multidisciplinary OER sources at once.

Users are encouraged to cite and link to digital content and are free to do so without asking for permission. Depending on the source of the digitized work, licenses or other contractual terms may restrict further distribution or other uses. Please consult the "Access and Use" statement included in the PageTurner view for each item (in the grey drop-down box in the upper left corner of the viewing area), for volume-specific information. You need to make your own assessment of the copyright or other legal concerns related to uses beyond those provided by HathiTrust for particular works.

Search engine for high quality supplementary resources for an ever-expanding selection of topics.

NOTE: this resource contains both open access only and open educational materials; always check the terms of use and/or licence of the work before reusing. This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

free and open collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials for higher education.

Some free, some low-cost educator resources

Free and open collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials for higher education.

The online Experiential Learning Toolkit provides resources and information to help ensure students learning on the job receive the right skills, experiences and supports, both from their school, and from the business or organization hosting them. The toolkit aims to help industry and community organizations, as well as the student’s educational institution, work together to design effective, valuable on-the-job work and learning experiences.

These modules are grounded in The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’s (HEQCO) A Practical Guide for Work Integrated Learning and represent over 35 hours of rich content that can be used by faculty, career-services staff, and employers to support student learning in applied and work-integrated settings. The modules, licensed under the Creative Commons (CC BY NC 4.0), may be packaged together to create an online course, substantial units of a course, or to supplement WIL experiences within other courses.

Organized by source type and by subject or use the search bar.

over 30 000 resources that are free to use with Creative Commons licensing (check terms of use for each resource before making modifications).

Find a variety of open and free sources for educational media here, including: audio books, MOOCs, movies, language lessons, eBooks, and more.

The Directory of Open Access Repositories, is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

One web page for every book ever published.

This page lists the course materials that Oregon community college and university instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses.

There are tens of thousands of learning objects that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime.

The Orange Grove repository, is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources. The repository can also be integrated with your Learning Management Systems (e.g., Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn, Canvas) . Discover, contribute, and import repository resources directly from your LMS.

has both full open access journals as well as optional open access journals. Optional open access journals have the permissions linked right to the article and may require a fee depending on the article and the use of the article. The majority of journals are scientifically based with some subject coverage on history and law.

PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

Find open textbooks created using Pressbooks (use the licence filter on the side to limit to CC books).

Over 42,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

Over 300 free, self-paced online courses built with OERs.

Repository of workforce training materials. Supported by the U.S. Department of Labor.

OER repository of quizzes, courses, lessons, learning objects.

Catalogue of courses that you can adopt and modify.

The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

“UCL is pleased to announce the launch of UCL Press, the University’s in house publishing arm. UCL Press will be the first fully Open Access university press in the UK with all books, journals and monographs freely available online, creating a diverse and accessible global knowledge resource…. All titles published by UCL Press will be made available in Open Access digital form, as well as in print and e-book formats available commercially.”

"Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. "

Lists open textbooks in a number of subject areas. It also includes a directory of other open textbook sites and a guide to using open textbooks

Curated collection of post-secondary education textbooks, many of which have been reviewed and vetted by educators across Canada.

"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."

Provides open textbooks that are peer-reviewed by educators, and can be reused and remixed to align with general course requirements.

Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively. This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.

A helpful blog post with a long list of sources for images.

over a million images, free of copyright restrictions. Some ideas for remixing content from the British Museum can be found here.

Canva.com is a design platform and source of low cost stock photos. Some photos are free, but you need to set up an account and follow the license terms: https://about.canva.com/license-agreements/

Directory of sites that use Creative Commons licensing; organized by media type: audio, video, image, text, other.

Use this prototype to find images that you can use and remix, across several open archives. Includes 375,000 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The Gender Spectrum Collection is a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés. This collection aims to help media better represent members of these communities as people not necessarily defined by their gender identities—people with careers, relationships, talents, passions, and home lives." (from https://genderphotos.vice.com/)

The Getty provides access to all digital images in their collection that are in the public domain.

Set the usage rights (at the bottom of the page) to match your needs.

Database of symbols/icons that represent common ideas and items. Some are Creative Commons licensed and free, others are not; make sure to read the license information.

Download vector images of hand-drawn people or the complete library of components that you can mix and match.

Stock photos free for commercial and non-commercial use.

Copyright-friendly photos and images for teachers and students.

High quality public domain & Creative Commons images available.

"By depicting everyday activities such as making a salad or reading a book using plus-size models, we intend for images to be used by a wide variety of content creators—not just those addressing plus-size issues. These photos are available for all uses and feature plus-size people. While attribution is not required to use the photos, we do ask that you please credit AllGo and photographer Michael Poley of Poley Creative whenever possible so that others may find our stock photo collections. "

Publicdomainvectors.org, offers copyright-free vector images in popular .eps, .svg, .ai and .cdr formats.

"...where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."

This site has a different approach:
"At Unglue.it, you can reward creators that have set their books free, via Creative Commons licenses. You can buy books that WANT to be free, but need funding to get there. You can pledge toward creating free ebooks from print books."

All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.

Combination of public domain, CC licensed, and licensable high-def stock videos, animations, music, and sound effects.

Over 100,000 hi-res images licensed under CC-BY.

Permits the use of over 10 million media files. It is a media file repository that allows accessibility to public domain and freely-licensed educational media content. This includes images, sounds, and video clips.

These 16,000 BBC Sound Effects are made available by the BBC in WAV format to download for use under the terms of the RemArc Licence - okay for personal, educational or research purposes, as detailed in the license.

BeatPick is a boutique licensing company and handpicks each of its songs. In over 6 years of activity, they have put together a music catalog of over 30,000 high quality songs

Looking for music for a video, school project, game you’re developing, podcast or just for listening in your cubicle or mobile music device? Find exactly the music you’re looking for - podsafe, liberally licensed - using dig.ccMixter Music Discovery tool.
Find out why one out of six uploads to ccMixter are used in a YouTube(tm) video, flickr moving image, podcast, compilation album and thousands of other places all over the web.

The Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads. The Free Music Archive is directed by WFMU, the most renowned freeform radio station in America. Radio has always offered the public free access to new music. The Free Music Archive is a continuation of that purpose, designed for the age of the internet.

Public Domain sheet music that complies with Canadian Copyright Law.

SOCAN is the Canadian copyright collective that administers the performing rights of composers, authors and music publisher members by licensing the use of their music in Canada. Check here for licensing information for commercial use of music.

Combination of public domain, CC licensed, and licensable high-def stock videos, animations, music, and sound effects.