Copyright Essentials

Open Education Resources (OERs) Other Sources for Educators

Creative Commons - Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally. Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.

HEAL Health Education Assets Library - HEAL "is a digital library that provides freely accessible digital teaching resources of the highest quality that meet the needs of today's health sciences educators and learners."

LibreTexts - "LibreTexts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to freeing the textbook from the limitations and costs of traditional textbooks. Our open and freely accessible LibreTexts provide a more engaging learning experience for students without the financial burden."

MERLOT Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching - Peer-reviewed online teaching and learning materials. From California State University System.

MIT OpenCourseware - Free lecture notes, exams, videos, and other educational resources from MIT.

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. Some of our materials (also called open educational resources, or OER) are paired with low-cost textbooks ($30 or less). Many of the courses can be taught at no cost to students. Unless otherwise noted, all materials are shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY) license. OCL courses and materials have undergone testing for accessibility and have been designed using the industry-standard Quality Matters (QM) rubric for assessing the quality of online courses."

Open Stax - A non-profit digital ecosystem. It serves millions of users per month, delivering free educational content to improve learning outcomes.

Open Textbook Library - A large collection of high-quality digital textbooks that can be downloaded for free as PDF or e-book files. The books come from multiple authors and publishing organizations and cover a wide range of academic areas, including the humanities, natural and social sciences, and mathematics, as well as medicine and law. It also includes detailed reviews written by faculty and instructors. From the University of Minnesota.

E-Books

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - A directory of thousands of academic open access books from hundreds of academic publishers including DeGruyter, SpringerNature, Taylor & Francis, Peter Lang, and Oxford UP. All books carry Creative Commons licenses. Books are peer-reviewed prior to being added to the database. DOAB titles are also searchable in the Library's catalog.

Internet Archive - Using controlled digital lending to ensure 1 to 1 lending for a limited time period, similar to current library practices in loaning physical books, the Internet Archive offers 1,300,000 modern e-books that may be borrowed for a period of two weeks by anyone with a free archive.org account. Borrowers may read them directly online or download them to Adobe Digital editions. The Internet Archive (IA) also offers some 20,000 freely available books and texts, as well as films, music, audiobooks, images, and many more resources. The IA also acts as a search engine to other freely available resources in important collections.

Images, Photos & Other Art Work

Art Images for College Teaching - From the University of Michigan. Provides the free exchange of image resources for the educational art community.

Creative Commons Image Search - Allows discovery of openly licensed and public domain images from museums, image banks, and other image repositories. Click on "filter" to search by image provider or license type. As of this writing (May 2019), only images are included but plans to add other media types as the database grows in size and use.

Google Advanced Image Search - Be sure to use the Usage Rights search field to limit by license type.

Library of Congress Digital Collections - A free “digital record of American history and creativity.”

Library of Congress: Prints & Photographs Online Catalog - Photographs, prints, drawings, posters, and architectural drawings, and more.

NGA Images - Public domain artworks from the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

Noun Project - Free clip art images requiring creator credit.

NYPL Digital Gallery - Illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs, and more, from the New York Public Library.

Open ClipArt - Open Clipart is an online media collection of more than 160,000 vectorial graphics, entirely in the public domain. All graphics are stored using the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. Major standard supported all across the web, SVG files are very portable and can easily be scaled, edited, or printed without deformation. Join and contribute your own clipart to this public domain resource.

Pixabay - Pixabay offers millions of royalty-free stock photos and videos.

The Commons on Flickr - "The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." Includes images from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Getty Research Institute, and others.

Image credit: Collier, John, Jr, photographer. Penasco, New Mexico. A dance. New Mexico Penasco Penasco. Taos County United States, 1943. Jan. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017842182/.