OER@tamucc.edu | 361 825 2588
"OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources" (From the OER Commons home page).
Textbooks available through Open Education Network, University of Minnesota.
"The World's Most Popular Online Textbook Platform" and "LibreTexts is a non-profit organization" collaborating with CA State University's Affordable LEarning Solutions, US Dept. of Education, UC Davis, Merlot, & National Science Foundation (From the LibreTexts homepage).
Peer-Reviewed textbooks available through 501(c)(3) managed by Rice University.
Search all adopted material "that Oregon community college and university instructors are using to reduce textbook costs in their courses."
Library Guide lists OER Resources by Academic Departments & provides a search box to OASIS (SUNY's multi-repository search)
Pressbooks Directory: Search over 2100 Open Access books.
Pressbooks (more broadly): allows faculty to "find, adapt, create, and contribute to educational content that is customizable, accessible, interactive, and, if the author chooses, free."
OpenStax also offers unique textbook-specific sets for teaching that can include PowerPoint slides, solutions manuals, test banks, review questions, and more!
OER Commons Hub is a venue for instructors to share ancillary materials that they have created to pair with OpenStax textbooks.
"Enables better learning for your students and easy course creation for you. With digital reading, personalized homework, a library of thousands of assessments, and LMS integration, OpenStax Tutor works well for online, hybrid, and in-person courses."
"DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available."
"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."
Open resources including courseware for faculty.
Discovery search across 19 Open sources. Is NOT a repository or database. Suggested use: make sure “OER-specific sites” is checked to narrow down results.
Program of CA State University System & partners. "The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers" (From the Merlot homepage).
"OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation."
OER Resources for History. "OER Project courses make sense of our world by connecting the past to the present with an eye toward the future. Everything is free, online, and totally adaptable to meet your students' individual needs."
As a central search entry point, OERSI connects OER repositories of distributed state initiatives, institutional repositories of universities and libraries, and subject-specialized repositories for OER. Materials are made available through the connected sources.
The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books.
"All Openverse content is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain."
Open Educational Resources from Leading Colleges & Universities (Worldwide)
TextBookGo.com is your number one source for free etextbooks. We bring you free digital textbooks from all sources and for all courses! We offer free etextbooks for many subject categories and for all tablet and digital textbook viewing devices.
British Columbia Campus system's browse option for curated OER.
Open Library of curated material from the Ontario campus system.
GALILEO Open Learning Materials is [a] USG [University System of Georgia]-wide repository for all created resources under Affordable Learning Georgia, including resources created under Textbook Transformation Grants, our open textbooks created in partnership with the University of North Georgia Press, and all other ALG programs.
First Open Courses made publicly available. Include syllabi, readings, etc.
Discovery search, NOT a repository or database. "OASIS is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 78 different sources and contains 323,948 records" (From OASIS' "About" page).
OERTX Repository Discover collections of resources. Contribute OER. Collaborate with educators.
University of Michigan's Institutional Repository
Free educational tools for cognitive neuroscience -- Free access to materials for students, educators, and researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
MLA-provided network for people working in the humanities. Includes the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials. Discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials. Offers interdisciplinary connections and allows for sharing in the repository.
BC Campus' OER by Discipline Directory
An Open Education reference of OER listed by subject area and disciplines with McMaster academic programming
Workforce Development Digital Library -- FREE and OPEN Workforce Training Materials for 21st Century Employment
With 503 contributors from 201 colleges, universities, museums, and research centers, SmartHistory is the most-visited art history resource in the world.
These resources should help you find images that are openly licensed for reuse. Always be sure to check the license type before using anything you find online!
Great resource for how to find (specifics) and correctly use images, as well as recommended places to search for openly licensed images.
"This is a disability-led effort to provide free stock images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC)."
"Disability:IN is pleased to offer disability stock photography to the public. We encourage corporations to use this in recruitment material, marketing material, internal and external communications, etc. These photos were taken by Jordan Nicholson, and can be contacted at jordan.n.photo@gmail.com. Please take note of the photo usage guidelines"
Run your keyword search, then on results page, choose desired CC license under “Any License” (top left).
"The vision of the UK Human Development Institute is the full participation and contribution of all people with disabilities in all aspects of society. These photos can be downloaded and used to create and enhance visual and digital products, social media posts, and project websites."
"A free library of images celebrating women’s lives and their work in 13 countries around the world."
"Free African high quality photos for your projects."
"Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free."
Find ~700 million images and audio files across dozens of open repositories. Openverse provides proper rich-text attributions.
"The best free stock photos, royalty free images & videos shared by creators"
Stock photo library of multi-racial images licensed CC-BY.
"Over 4.2 million+ high quality stock images, videos and music shared by our talented community"
"The internet's source for visuals. Powered by creators everywhere." [Unsplash photos are made to be used freely. Our license reflects that. All photos can be downloaded and used for free; commercial & non-commercial purposes; no permission needed (though attribution is appreciated!)]
Find ~75 million images (as well as sound- and video-clips). Check license types and reuse permissions!
"The #WOCinTech photos are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-License. This means that you may copy, distribute, and display the images as long as you attribute #WOCinTech Chat or wocintechchat.com"
Harvard Law School Library's LibGuide: "This guide will help you find and correctly attribute public domain and Creative Commons media for your project or presentation."
shared from Buena Vista University's OER LibGuide, "Create OER" page.
Here are sites for subject-specific images. Some may be Creative Commons Licensed or Public Domain, but be sure to check before using any of them!
"Open Access" is an option below the search modifiers, to limit to openly-licensed content.
"The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in our permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial."
"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 more than 4.5 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."
A list of resources (with links) from Apollo: The International Art Magazine.
This is an image resource, not strictly Creative Commons or openly licensed content; check licenses before reuse.
"Explore 856,983 items digitized from the New York Public Library's collections. This site is a living database with new materials added every day, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more. Our collections include some content that may be harmful or difficult to view." *Check each image for copyright/licensing information before reuse!
A free museum and library exploring health and human experience. *Check each image for copyright/licensing information before reuse!
"NASA has always told its story through its images, a few of which have become icons of human history."
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. Generally speaking, content created by government agencies is free for public use (not copyrighted).
"Explore our planet through photography and imagery, including climate change and water all the way back to the 1800s when the USGS was surveying the country by horse and buggy."
"Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) in NLM Digital Collections provides online access to images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. IHM includes image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century." *Check each image for copyright/licensing information before reuse!
from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. "The imagery showcased in the PHIL is historic in nature; the contents depicted, though appropriate at the time a photograph was captured, may no longer be appropriate in the context of the current time period, and is not to be viewed as a source of the most current public health information."
Look for “usage rights” at bottom of form & select best option for you.
Discover Track s & Playlists
"All music is composed and produced by Jason Shaw. This music is royalty free - completely free - for you to download and use (even for commercial purposes) as long as you provide credit."
"Discover new independent artists. Free streaming, Free download"
Creative Commons allows free non-commercial use of our music - just Attribute. (CC-BY tracks can even be used commercially with Attribution!)
"Need to get hold of royalty-free Creative Commons music? Find everything you need for your projects on these sites."
"Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to 'encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.' It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library."
"The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books."
"HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries."
The CGP is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive information for historical and current publications as well as direct links to the full document, when available. Users can search by authoring agency, title, subject, and general keywords, or click on "Advanced Search" for more options. *Generally speaking, content created by government agencies is free for public use (not copyrighted).
Print-on-demand is a great way for students to get print copies of open resources, if they so desire. Unlike traditionally-published textbooks, students can have both print and online versions with minimal cost. (For example, a new information literacy text costs $200; an OER printed via Lulu cost $13.61.) For more information about how to use these resources, contact Alexa Hight, Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian.
Lowest-cost resource. Shipping takes ~2 weeks.
This page "Locating Open Resources," is adapted from "Open Educational Resources" by Adams State University Nielson Library, used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License