Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Find OERs

Find OERs

There are a number of generic and subject specific repositories and websites where you can find free openly licensed content which can be adapted to your teaching and learning.

Find Openly Licensed Content for Re-Use

The following resources provide free access to course materials such as assignments, readings, lecture notes, presentations, educational videos, and more.

Wikipedia's Comprehensive List of CC Works by Type

Wikipedia offers a fairly comprehensive listing of many major sources of CC material across various domains..

OER Commons

OER Commons is a large repository for Open Educational Resources, including activities, assessments, lecture notes, lesson plans, and more. It is a project of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Unlike some sources, OER Commons contains material for grade levels from preschool to graduate school and adult education. Not all material is reviewed.
MERLOT
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), is a curated collection of Open Educational Resources, including assignments, drills, full courses, presentations, and textbooks. Many materials include peer reviews, user reviews, or editor reviews. MERLOT is a program of the California State University system.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT Open Courseware is a huge open collection of MIT’s course content. Almost all MIT course content is available, with material from 2260 courses across all disciplines available. No means of evaluating content is provided.

DOAJ
The Directory of Open Access Journals is a collection of over 10,000 publications, aimed at creating a comprehensive index of high quality Open Access journals. Journals which best exemplify openness and quality are awarded the DOAJ Seal.

BioMed
BioMed Central is an open access publisher owned by Springer. Over 260 journals in the fields of science, technology, and medicine are published by BioMed Central.
JURN
JURN is an open access journal article search engine dedicated to the Arts and the Humanities. Since spring 2014 it has also included articles on science, business, and other topics.
PLoS
PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit journal publisher that publishes several Open Access science journals. Most journals are restricted to a single subject, and some have subjective selection criteria, but PLOS ONE accepts all technically and ethically sound research.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is an archive of freely available biomedical and life science journal articles compiled by the US National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). Over 3.5 million articles are available.

Creative Commons Search
Creative Commons Search is a tool that can help you search other databases (Europeana, Flickr, Jamendo, etc.) for images, music, video, and other media protected under a Creative Commons Licence.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of free books, movies, music, and more. The material is organized into various thematic or institutional collections.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons contains over 27 million freely usable media files, including images, sounds, and videos. The highest quality items are ‘Featured’ by the site and appear in picture of the day and picture of the year selections.

DOAB
The Directory of Open Access Books is a collection of over 3,000 academic and peer-reviewed Open Access titles. Books can be searched by title, subject, or publisher.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of free books, movies, music, and more. The material is organized into various thematic or institutional collections.
OAPEN
Open Access Publishing in European Networks is a non-profit foundation dedicated to publishing Open Access academic books. The platform specializes in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Collaborators include Oxford University Press and Routledge.
Open Library
Open Library is an open library project aiming toward the ambitious goal of “a web page for every book ever published” (Homepage). Over 1,000,000 free books are available, along with another eBook lending library of over 250,000 books.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a collection of over 49,000 free ebooks, including many classics. All books on Project Gutenberg were previously published by reputable publishers. Books are available in HTML, plain text, or common ebook formats.
InTech
The world's largest publisher of open access science, technology, and medicine books. InTech has made over 3,000 books available for free download.
University of Oxford Text Archive
A collection of literary and linguistic resources for use in higher education, research, teaching, and learning. Resources available in XML, HTML, ePub, mobi, and plain text. Many resources provide links to automatically analyze the texts using Voyant.
Perseus Digital Library
An online collection of primarily Classical texts, including Ancient Greek and Roman materials, but also Arabic, Germanic, 19th century American, and Renaissance material.

The following projects publish, compile, or provide access to Open Access textbooks.

eCcampusOntario Open Textbook Library
eCampusOntario.ca, the primary face of the Ontario Online Learning Consortium (OOLC), a not-for-profit corporation of all publicly-funded colleges and universities in Ontario, has partnered with BCcampus to build an Open Textbook Library. Students and faculty can browse, view, and download 180 free open textbooks for use in their courses. The textbooks have been reviewed and created by a variety of contributors.

BCcampus OpenEd
BCcampus OpenEd provides a curated collection of over 150 of the best open textbooks from other sources. Most book pages include comprehensive reviews by Canadian professors. There is also a guide to finding open textbooks.
MERLOT
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a curated collection of Open Educational Resources, including textbooks. Many books include peer reviews, user reviews, or editor reviews. Users can restrict search results to textbooks only by selecting the appropriate material type. MERLOT is a program of the California State University system.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a large repository for Open Educational Resources, including textbooks. It is a product of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. Unlike some sources, OER Commons contains material for grade levels from preschool to graduate school and adult education. Textbooks are not generally as extensively reviewed as they are in other sources.
Open Textbook Library
Open Textbook Library is a collection of open textbooks on a variety of subjects created by the University of Minnesota. This collection lists more books than the BC OpenCampus project, but fewer books are reviewed.
OpenStax College
OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization and initiative of Rice University dedicated to publishing quality Open Access Textbooks in a range of disciplines.
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is a huge Open Textbook project with over 2800 titles. Books are not officially peer-reviewed, and beyond the project's featured books there is little on-site means of evaluation. Many books are only partially complete.
FreeTech Books
A site listing free online computer science, engineering, and programming books, textbooks, and lecture notes. Books are published under open licenses, are in the public domain, or have another license that allows the work to be distributed freely.

Open Government Canada

This site is Canada’s federal Open Government portal. Open federal datasets can be found using the search engine. Provincial and municipal open government projects can easily be found using this page.
City of Toronto Open Data

Data for the City of Toronto covering infrastructure, environment, public safety, transportation and other areas, all available from the municipal government under an open license.
Data.gov

Data.gov is the central portal for US government open data. Over 150,000 datasets are searchable, and can be browsed by topic or agency.
Data.gov.uk

The centre for the UK’s open government data. Search over 22,000 published datasets. Includes map-based search and government organization tree chart (organogram).
European Union Open Data Portal

Over 8,000 searchable datasets from the European Union. Data can be browsed by subject or visualized using applications.
UNdata

A search engine for UN statistical databases, this tool searches 34 databases with over 60 million records.

Census Bureau Data

US Census Bureau data can be found here. Includes links to many tools which use or visualize census data.
Healthdata.gov

A US government site "dedicated to making high value health data more accessible" (homepage). Over 1900 datasets searchable by tags, format, author, etc.
New York Times APIs

A collection of application program interfaces for New York Times data. Includes searches for articles, book reviews, political information (campaign finance, congressional votes), movie reviews and more.

How to Google search for openly licensed resources

When you do a Google Search filter your results to only find images, videos, or text that you have permission to use
- Go to the Google Image search and type in a search term and hit enter. You can then filter and sort your results by clicking on the ‘Tools’ button just below the search bar with additional filters for item size, colour, type, time, usage rights, or more tools
- Click on ‘Usage rights’. This will provide a drop down menu with the following options:
  - Not filtered by license
  - Labeled for reuse with modification
  - Labeled for reuse
  - Labeled for noncommercial reuse with modification
  - Labeled for non-commercial reuse

Search Creative Commons

Search Creative Commons to find content licensed under a Creative Commons license aggregated from a range of public repositories.

Integrate Library Resources

Make best use of resources Queen’s University Library already pays for (i.e. subscribed/purchased library content) to support your teaching and learning. Visit the Library website for more information.

For help locating Library resources, connect with your Subject Librarian.