Locate - Open Educational Resources - OER - Library at SUNY College at Old Westbury

Find OER, Public Domain and Open Access Resources

Mason OER Metafinder
Provides a one-stop search box that cross-searches 21 different open educational resource platforms. Created by George Mason University.
OASIS
The Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) search tool, developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library, aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 91 different sources and contains 365,241 records.
OER Commons
Search tool for identifying subject-specific OER materials, from full courses, to textbooks, to individual lessons and videos. You can also use Open Author, a course builder tool to create your own curated set of materials from their listings.

SUNY OER Ready-to-Adopt Courses
Milne Open Textbooks
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Libretexts
The LibreText Project is a leading, non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. 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.
Open Textbook Library
Open Textbook Network allows for modifying of their open textbooks using the Pressbooks platform.
OpenStax
Collection of Math, Science, and Social Science textbooks. Follows a traditional textbook publication model (expert authors, professional editing, copy editing, peer review, etc.) and releases all content under a CC BY license. Instructional support materials available upon request.
Pressbooks Directory
Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes 5,512 open access books published by 153 organizations and networks using Pressbooks. It's easy to copy, revise, remix, and redistribute any openly licensed content found here using Pressbooks' publishing platform. Nearly all books are highly accessible, and many include interactive H5P learning activities to engage learners.
Merlot II
Merlot is curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
BC Campus OpenEd > Find Open Textbooks
An Open Textbooks project hosted by a Canadian publicly funded organization that supports higher education in British Columbia. Scholarly peer-reviewed textbooks that are published under a Creative Commons license.
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Complete courses across a wide range of disciplines, combining texts from various publishers with assignments and other instructional resources.
Open Learn
Resources from the Open University in Great Britain. Materials range from single lessons, to modules, to full course materials, on a wide range of subjects. Not all materials on this site are openly licensed. Check the intellectually property license for each resource of interest.
Open Yale Courses
Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world.
Noba
The Noba catalog provides modules covering the traditional scope of introductory psychology and related topics.

HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Many of the 8.4 million digitized titles are under copyright.
Project Gutenberg
Offers a massive collection of full-text classics, open access and public domain books. You will find the world's great literature here, especially older works for which copyright has expired.
Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
UnGlue It
A collection of openly licensed eBooks on a variety of academic and non-academic topics.

What is Open Access?

Open Access is not the same as OER. Open Access materials are still under traditional copyright. They cannot be copied, shared, or remixed. The thing that makes them distinctive is that, unlike traditional journal articles, you can read them on the web without having a subscription or paying for a download. This is important for the free flow of scholarly communication and the sustainability of libraries; however it doesn't allow you to embed the content in your course. You can still only link to Open Access articles, not copy or share them.

Open Access articles are articles that are free to the reader (and the library.) They are found:

in Open Access journals
in journals that allow a mix of traditionally published and Open Access content
in repositories, which are usually hosted by universities and other research institutions
on the open web, on author's web sites or on aggregator sites like ResearchGate

"What is Open Access?" by Sarah Morehouse is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Provides full-text, Open Access, peer-reviewed journals.
OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR is a directory of academic open access repositories.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar searches scholarly content in journals, repositories, and web sites. When an article is Open Access, there will be a link to it. When it is not Open Access, there will only be information about it. Not all the content Google Scholar indexes meets rigorous criteria for scholarly.
Elsevier Open Access Journals
All articles in open access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download.
ScienceDirect
Provides over 1,100 open access titles.
SpringerOpen
SpringerOpen provides over 200 peer-reviewed, fully open access journals and over 300 open access books covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences.
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Nonprofit Open Access publisher in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.
Wiley Open Access
Wiley Open Access publishes authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across many research disciplines.
PubMed Central
PMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine
OMICS International
This publisher hosts over 700+ leading-edge peer reviewed Open Access Journals.
BioMed Central
BioMed Central publishes peer-reviewed open access journals.

Multiple Media

Openverse
Over 700 million openly licensed images, audio and more.
Wikimedia Commons
Images, sounds, and videos.
Internet Archive
Multiple media. Rich repository of public domain content. (Also home to the excellent Wayback Machine).

Images

Unsplash
Images. Professional photography released under a generous license, though no longer fully Creative Commons licensed.
Flickr
Images. Put in your search term and filter by “license” at the top left.
Library of Congress
Public Domain images
New York Public Library
Public Domain Collection
The Getty Trust
Open Content Collection
National Gallery of Art
NGA has an open access policy for digital images of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images are available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use the images.
Noun Project
Images. Extensive library of icon images that is oddly addictive to search through. All CC BY.
Pixaby
Images. Icons, clip art, photography, vector graphics. royalty-free images, videos, audio and other media. Contains some CC0 (Public Domain).
Digital Public Library of America
Provides links to a wide range of multimedia objects form libraries, museums and archives in the U.S. The copyright status of items vary but many are public domain or available for re-use. Each item has a "rights" field with information.
Reusable Art
Public domain images from vintage drawings, books, and other media

Videos

Open Video Project
A collection of open access digitized videos for learning and education purposes.
Vimeo
Videos. Put in your search term, select “More Filters” on left, and scroll down to identify the CC license of your choice.
Khan Academy
Short 10 minute videos covering math, biology, chemistry, physics and even the humanities, finance and history.
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
More than 900 TEDTalks are now available. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
YouTube
Videos. Put in your search term, select “Filters” at the top of the results, and select “Creative Commons.” All results will be CC BY.
Video Lectures on OER Commons
Use the facets to the left to refine your results.
Bozeman Science
Series of videos on basic biology, earth science, chemistry, statistics and physics.

Audio

Free Music Archive (FMA)
The Free Music Archive offers free downloads under Creative Commons and other licenses.
Bandcamp
Uploaded music to Bandcamp with a Creative Commons license.
LibriVox
Free public domain audio books.
Internet Archive
Internet Archive has a nice collection of audio.

Search Tips

Flickr - After searching by keyword in Flickr, click on Any License and select the usage license of your choice.

YouTube - After searching by keyword in YouTube, use the Filters feature to filter your results to those videos with a Creative Commons License.

Google - Use the Advanced Search under Usage Rights and select to limit your results to resources which are Free to use, modify or share. More from Google on Usage Rights.