One of the challenges is to decide which source(s) to choose from the myriads of choices...
Best to start searching in an OER repository.
OER collections like MERLOT and OER Commons are resources created by the OER community. You can also contribute to these repositories through creating, licensing and subsequently depositing your OER in one of these collections.
The lists of resources under the Best Bets sub-tabs are by no means comprehensive but they can be used as a starting point for work in any discipline. Note that not all of the learning materials in these repositories and sources are OER for modifying. However, most of the content is freely available under Fair Use and/or with attribution.
Use the Advanced Search feature when available. You may limit your search by type, educational level, year...
Start with broad terms (e.g. disease instead of cancer) and then narrow.
As you narrow, think about disciplinary language. Is there something more specific or technical that might best describe your topic?
If you still are not getting good results, try to start with the browsing feature (even if it's very broad). Sometimes the term you are searching is not used but you still know it would be under a broad subject like "economics" or "communications".
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) maintains a list of repository contacts for repositories in Australian and New Zealand universities.
This repository indexes academic resources - journals, institutional repositories, digital collections... that provide an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents.
An open education project for post secondary institutions in British Columbia. It provides a directory listing of all major repositories to start your open textbook search.
(COnnecting REpositories), an Open University initiative, aims to facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems. CORE provides access to millions of scholarly articles aggregated from many Open Access repositories.
Independent academic publisher of OA books licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND. Submissions are subject to peer review and authors retain copyright.
Aggregates free, full-text peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings & more. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions worldwide.
Contains a variety of open access books in diverse fields, including the sciences, social science & humanities. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access.
A link and list of OER publications.
An MLA affiliated network that provides opportunities for people working in the humanities to make interdisciplinary connections.with open-access scholarship.
Subscribes to the Budapest Open Access Initiative and are members of OA publishing organizations. Books are submitted to and indexed by scientific databases.
Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
An easy-to-use platform developed by faculty, students and scholars for construction, customization and dissemination of OER.
The new home for all of Manchester University Press's Open Access content. All users have free access to books and journals published under a Creative Commons open access license.
This search engine from George Mason University is connected to 16 major OER repositories.
A California State University system program, MERLOT invites educators to share and review OER. Items submitted range from simulations, class activities, media case studies, open journal articles and textbooks.
Online open textbooks organized by topic, from MIT. Mainly science and engineering based, but also has some management and language texts.
Union catalog of digital resources from open archive collections. OAIster records are fully accessible through WorldCat.org as well as on the OCLC FirstSearch service.
Developed in consultation with the State University of New York OER, this repository searches open textbooks, courseware & more. Can limit searches by CC licenses & faculty review.
A dynamic digital library/network for searching, browsing, and evaluating textbooks, lessons, videos and more, in OER Commons’ growing collection.
The beta version of Google custom search engine for open/free educational resources.
The World Bank's collection of open access resources, primarily in international economics but also including selections from related topics.
Complete courses from Carnegie Mellon University conducted either face-to-face, online, or hybrid. See also: Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University; Open Learning at Harvard.
The home for open resources at the University of Michigan. Provides information on expertise and services for OER, open data and open publications.
If you're looking for OER that are packaged for use, OpenStax by Rice University is a good place to start. OpenStax specializes in creating peer reviewed textbooks and accompanying materials in a wide variety of fields (electrical engineering, music, psychology...)
Winner of Outstanding Site 2016, this Washington Open Resources network provides a myriad of materials, licensing information, attribution of sources and faculty testimonials.
Most books in Project Gutenberg are not protected by copyright and are available for download. More information for use with mobile devices can be found at MobileReader Devices How-To
List of best sites with free public domain books to download.
In support of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, Taylor & Francis is sharing research content consisting of a curated list of academic journals and eBook chapters as Free-to-Access for a limited time.
Curated by librarians and faculty from leading colleges and universities, the repository brings together high quality open access materials including textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia & more.
This is an open courseware initiative by The University of Nottingham. The collection offers various educational resources for use and modification.
A broad-based publisher of peer-reviewed open access journals covering art and humanities, engineering, medicine, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences and agricultural sciences.
A pioneer of open access publishing for quality peer-reviewed journals such as BMC Biology, BMC Medicine, & BMC Series. BMC is expanding into the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering disciplines.
"CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public".
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.
Explore a wide selection of open access journal titles that are available in this leading scientific database. The NUS Library also has a subscription to this database, which provides access to more scientific journal titles that are not openly accessible.
Since 2009, JURN's unique search engine provides access to free academic articles and books from selected university full-text repositories. Includes e-journals in arts, science, biomedical, business and law.
The new home for all of Manchester University Press's Open Access content. All users have free access to books and journals published under a Creative Commons open access license.
Established in 2007 with the sole aim of providing a platform for Open Access to research information / scholarly journals pertaining to diversified fields of science and technology.
A peer-reviewed open access, internationally supported, academic led and high quality multi-journal platform for higher level humanities.
Journal articles, books, theses, and conference papers, and other published research from Open University, a UK based distance learning institution.
Titles participating in the Oxford Open scheme are broadly included in one of two open access models, either full or optional open access.
Contains peer reviewed open access articles, focusing on biology and medical science. PLOS authors publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. NIH / NLM Libraries. Refine your search to “Open Access” and check the license of individual article before reusing the content.
Search for Open Access articles from ScienceDirect.
SCIRP is currently publishing more than 200 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
Includes peer-reviewed, fully open access journals across all areas of science. It ranges from very specialized titles to SpringerPlus, an interdisciplinary OA journal for all disciplines.
Publishes authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across biological, chemical and health sciences. Journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share.
An open education project for post secondary institutions in British Columbia. It provides a directory listing of all major repositories to start your open textbook search.
Provides access to digital resources of American libraries and archives.Contributing institutions include York Public Library, University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.
The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in OA in diverse fields - sciences, social science, humanities...
UC Press ebooks that are open to the public. Limit search results to "public access books".
Offers access to millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries and archives. Search for the author or title, and in the left-side panel narrow results by file type (“text”), and by copyright (“public domain marked”).
A collection of books digitized by US research libraries for preservation. It is good for academic use. Access to some of the content is restricted.
A huge repository of text, audio and video files, including public domain titles from Library of Congress, American libraries, Canadian libraries, books from Project Gutenberg and the Million Books Project.
The new home for all of Manchester University Press's Open Access content. All users have free access to books and journals published under a Creative Commons open access license.
These private, nonprofit institutions publish a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine. Almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book.
Contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences.
A nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. Through partnerships with philanthropic foundations and educational resource companies, OpenStax provides open textbooks that are peer reviewed and developed by professional content developers.
Based on the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Catalog, this is a clearinghouse of links to books housed in various locations, including OpenStax, Saylor and others. Books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality.
Most books in Project Gutenberg are not protected by copyright and are available for download. More information for use with mobile devices can be found at MobileReader Devices How-To
List of best sites with free public domain books to download.
Curated by librarians and faculty from leading colleges and universities, the repository brings together high quality open access materials including textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia & more.
Provides access to video lectures, online courses from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
Open textbooks from the California Open Source Digital Library. Choose a discipline, course, then look for the "accessibility reviews" column.
Large library of MOOCs, some of which have material freely licensed for re-use.
An online learning destination and MOOC provider, offering high-quality courses from over 120 leading universities including UC Berkeley, MIT and Harvard.
Harvard's Extension School's offering of free courses as well as for-credit courses at reasonable tuition rates.
Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
Online open textbooks organized by topic, from MIT. Mainly science and engineering based, but also has some management and language texts.
In collaboration with MERLOT, OEC offers a search engine on openly licensed online educational materials to freely use, share, and modify.
Complete courses from Carnegie Mellon University conducted either face-to-face, online, or hybrid. See also: Open Learning Initiative at Stanford University; Open Learning at Harvard.
The home for open resources at the University of Michigan. Provides information on expertise and services for OER, open data and open publications.
Multi award winning OpenLearn provides free courses in various subjects including articles, videos and interactive games by academics and experts.
OYC provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
Oxford University provides open content (CC licences) for reuse, remixing and redistribution worldwide.
This offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent sites that provide images, audio, and video. CC has no control over the results that are returned. Hence look for results that are under a CC license
A community of people who seek to promote the use of media in teaching. The materials posted here are mostly presented using Fair Use guidelines.
Hundreds of short educational videos covering many subjects; especially strong collections in science and math.
"The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required."
An online video-sharing site focused on social justice and environmental issues in the Asia-Pacific.
Internet Archive's films, shorts, silent films and trailers are available for viewing/downloading.
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news.
"... the focus is on works which have now fallen into the public domain, that vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction"
The Open University joined iTunes U in 2008, making available a range of high quality audio-visual resources used in their courses.
The site has a clear explanation of the different Creative Commons licenses and how you can or cannot use the videos.
"Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content... that [is] not subject to copyright restrictions which would prevent them being used by anyone, anytime, for any purpose."
An online video community that provides millions of originally-created videos for viewing. The key is filtering them to isolate the Creative Commons-licensed ones.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas. The short and powerful TED Talks share ideas for free and licensed under Creative Commons. Check out the TED Talks Usage Policy as well as TED's offerings by topics . TED-ED is a new initiative of curated educational videos on "Lessons (plans) Worth Sharing" aimed at educators and students.
Offers a wide selection of TV shows, videos, films, documentaries from acclaimed PBS series for streaming online.
This list suggests resources or ways to find openly licensed or public domain images and photos for your teaching and learning, including your MOOCs.
Access various digital media search services such as Google Images, Flickr, Europeana and Wikimedia Commons. Verify whether an individual work is available under a Creative Commons license before reuse.
Offers access to millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries and archives. Search for the author or title, and in the left-side panel narrow results by file type (“text”), and by copyright (“public domain marked”).
Home to tens of billions of photos and "... almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application". To search for reusable images, in ”Advanced Search”, choose from the pull-down menu the type of license needed (e.g. "Any license", "Creative Common license", etc.)
Based in Seattle, Washington, Getty is a supplier of royalty free stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers. Getty's terms of use say that users can “only use embedded Getty Images Content for editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are newsworthy or of public interest)”.
From the Google Image Advanced Search page, limit your search by "usage rights" (e.g. "Free to use and share, even commercially").
For free images, select the "Search only public domain items" option to limit your results to no known copyright restrictions items. When browsing, turn on the “Show Only Public Domain” button in the upper left corner.
The Open Photo Project is a photo sharing platform created in 1998 by Michael Jastremski. Contributors offered their images free of charge under CC licensing terms and conditions which vary from image to image.
Free stock photos, textures, images, pictures and clipart for any use including commercial.
Over 1 million+ high quality free images and royal free videos shared by Pixabay's talented community.
High quality copyright friendly images, not copyrighted and no restriction for their use. Images explicitly placed in the public domain, no "any rights reserved". Use it freely for any personal or commercial use.
Find thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects. All images are available for use under a Creative Commons license.
Online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. Almost all content may be freely reused subject to certain restrictions and terms of use. Check the license of individual source for reuse.