LibGuides: Faculty Services: Open Content

Open Textbooks and Learning Materials

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for Open Access monographs. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository. With a basic Search feature that searches all fields and an Advanced Search for searching by Title, Author, Keywords, and more.
College Open Textbooks
A selective directory of open textbooks listed by subject from a collaborative of educational organizations. The collection is focused on community college courses and other 2-year institutions and the first two years (lower division) of 4-year institutions. They provide training for instructors, peer reviews of open textbooks, mentoring online professional networks for authors, and other services.
Open Textbook Library
A library of open textbooks listed by subject and reviewed by experts. The project is based at the University of Minnesota with ten other university partners, including large mid-western research universities..
Open Course Library
A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts.
MERLOT
A free and open peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials and faculty-developed services contributed and used by an international education community. The collection consists of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web pages. Developed at California State University and now coordinated by the State Higher Education Executives Organization (SEEO).
OpenStax CNX
View and share free educational material in modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments. Provides tens of thousands of learning objects from a host of disciplines, accessible online and downloadable.
A non-profit digital ecosystem for the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes from Rice University and several philanthropic organizations.
OER Commons
Digital content hub to locate Open Educational Resources through a single point of access. Also offers OER implementation support, training and professional development initiatives. Founded by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education
OpenLearn
OpenLearn Create is an open educational platform where individuals and organisations can publish their open content, open courses and resources. It is Moodle based and has tools for collaboration, reuse and remixing.
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn.
Open SUNY Textbooks
Open SUNY Textbooks publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks for use in higher education
GALILEO Open Learning Materials
GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
PDXOpen
PDXOpen is an open access textbook publishing initiative to support Portland State faculty developing open access textbooks.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard. It tackles math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more.
LibreTexts
LibreTexts is a non-profit organization committed to freeing the textbook from the limitations and costs of traditional textbooks.
Open Research Library
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.
Open Pedagogy Notebook
This website is designed to serve as a resource for educators interested in learning more about Open Pedagogy. They invite you to browse through the examples, which include both classroom-tested practices and budding ideas, and to consider contributing examples of your own experiments with open pedagogy.

Open Courses

Open Course sites for students and instructors, Directories/Portals, CourseWare, CourseBuilders and other tools.

Academic Earth
Curated lists of free online college courses from top universities selected by staff.
Coursera
An education platform that partners with universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for free. Many institutions use the online platform with on-campus students in a blended model of learning.
EdX
Offers interactive online classes and MOOCs from universities including MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and more. A non-profit initiative governed by Harvard and MIT.
National Repository of Online Courses (NROC)
A library of online course content for students and faculty in higher education and high school. A project of the The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.
OERu
Coordinated by the OER Foundation, a network of institutions offering free online higher education courses for students worldwide. OERu partners also provide ways for learners to gain academic credit towards qualifications from recognized institutions.
MIT OpenCourseWare
A web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
CMU Open Learning Initiative
OLI at Carnegie Mellon University offers online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Courses are used for classroom instruction and designed to support the individual learner.
Google | Open Online Course
Create an online course as a Google App Engine application.

Media and Software

Free Music Archive
Provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
TED Talks
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. Topics coverall topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.
Vimeo Creative Commons
Here’s where you can browse all the videos on Vimeo that have a Creative Commons license applied to them.
Jamendo
200,000 royalty free tracks - Music library for any project, all rights included
LyX – The Document Processor
LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.
EPrints - What is Open Access?
EPrints Self-Archiving FAQ
To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website in order to disseminate the peer-reviewed research output of scholars.
LA Referencia
The Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications, or simply LA Referencia, is a Latin American network of open access repositories.
oaDOI
Leap over tall paywalls in a single bound. oaDOI is an alternative DOI resolver that gets free fulltext where available, instead of just an article landing page.
OAIster
Union catalog of millions of records for digital open access resources from collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH); freely-accessible through WorldCat.org from OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.)
OASIS
Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook
Open Access Directory (OAD)
A compendium of factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship including a list of FAQs. Hosted by Simmons College.
Open Archives Initiative
Develops standards for e-print archives to increase access to scholarly communication.
Oxford Open
Oxford University Press (OUP) is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research.
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
PLOS publishes a suite of peer-reviewed Open Access journals featuring quality research, expert commentary and critical analysis across all areas of science and medicine. Each journal is editorially independent and specialized with regard to both its selection criteria and breadth of content.
SPARC - Open Access
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.
- SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

Open Images & Media

Clker
Free clip art you can use for anything you like.
Flickr - Creative Commons
A collection of images on Flickr offered under a Creative Commons license.
Getty Open Content Images
Search images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program.
HippoCampus
Free academic resource site with multimedia content for middle-school, high-school and college general education subjects. A project of the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education.
Museo
Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library Digital Collection. Images you find here are typically free to use, but please check with the source institution for more specifics.
Noun Project
This community has designers and photographers from 120+ countries. They are building a professionally curated collection of authentic, beautiful images that celebrate diversity and represent a more inclusive world. The free basic plan includes more than 3 million icons.
NYPL Digital Gallery
Free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's collections.
Pixabay
All images and videos on Pixabay are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0. You may download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty free for anything you like, even in commercial applications.
Shared Shelf Commons
A free, open-access library of images powered by ARTstor
Unsplash
Beautiful, free photos.
Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
Nappy
Beautiful photos of Black and Brown people, for free.
Disabled And Here Collection
This is a disability-led effort to provide free & inclusive stock images from our own perspective, with photos and illustrations celebrating disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC).
Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library
The Biology Image Library is a growing collection of over 1100 text supported microscopic and macroscopic images and videos drawn from commercially prepared slide collections and live specimens commonly used in the study of Biology, Botany, Zoology, Histology and Microbiology.

Preprint Servers

AgriXiv
Preprints for Agriculture and Allied Sciences
arXiv
Open access to e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, Statistics, Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, and Economics
BioRxiv (beta)
A free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.
BITSS Preprints
An interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility, maintained by The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS)
CORE
CORE is a full-text, interdisciplinary, non-profit social repository designed to increase the impact of work in the Humanities.
engriXiv
The open archive of engineering
INA-Rxiv
The Preprint server of Indonesia
LawArXiv
Legal Scholarship in the Open
LISSA
A free, open scholarly platform for library and information science
MindRxiv
Free preprints for research on mind and contemplative practices
NutriXiv
A free preprint service for the nutritional sciences
paleorXiv
A preprint archive for Paleontology
PsyArXiv
A free preprint service for the psychological sciences, maintained by The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science
SocArXiv
Open archive of the social sciences
SocArXiv papers are moderated before publication. Visit SocOpen.org for more information.
SportRxiv
The open archive for sport-related research
Thesis Commons
An open archive of Theses
ROSA P
Repository and Open Science Access Portal, a public repository for US Department of Transportation Library’s collection
SSRN
SSRN is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks.

Faculty Services: Open Content

Search Multiple OER Repositories

Open Textbooks and Learning Materials

Open Courses

Media and Software

Open Access Journals

Open Images & Media

Preprint Servers