Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OER): OER by Type

Open Educational Resources by Type

Athabasca University Press
Peer-reviewed open access digital journals and monographs. Geographical focus is on Canada, the North American West, and the Circumpolar North.
Bloomsbury Open Content
Links to ebooks that Bloomsbury Publishing makes openly available.
Directory of Open Access Books
Search for open access books from participating academic publishers.
Google Books
Books to preview or read for free.
HathiTrust
A partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Living Books About Life
A series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.
OAPEN
Contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Open Humanities Press
An international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide.
Open Library
Online catalogue which includes links to free copies of books when available.
Palace Bookshelf
A collection of more than 11,000 eBooks that are free to download. The collection includes classics, children's books, textbooks, world language titles, etc.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 45,000 free ebooks.
Ubiquity Press
Publish both individual and series books, all fully peer reviewed.

Open Data

Open Data Commons
A set of legal tools to help you provide and use Open Data.
Canadian Open Data Society
List of Open Data portals organized by regions in Canada

Government and Governmental Agencies

Canadian Government
Open Data in Canada
A list of Canada’s provincial and municipal Open Data sites that have been created to release freely available open data in Canada.
UK Government
UN Data
US Government
World Bank Open Data
Free and open access to data about development in countries around the globe.

British Columbia

BC Geographic Data
B.C.’s investment in Spatial Data Infrastructure provides government agencies, businesses and citizens with direct access to authoritative, geographic data through a wide variety of web applications and services.
DataBC
The DataBC Catalogue provides easy access to public government data, applications and web services. These datasets are under multiple license types, with thousands of datasets under the BC Open Government License.
BC Open Data
The B.C. Government produces and maintains thousands of datasets that represent a broad range of information about natural resources, the economy, justice, education and social programs. Over 1000 datasets in the B.C. Data Catalogue are free for anyone to use or re-purpose under the Open Government License - British Columbia.
Open Data Vancouver
Explore City of Vancouver public data using tables, maps, and charts. Export it in many formats for more analysis.
New Westminster Open Data
The datasets are sourced directly from the City of New Westminster Departments and can be tabular (tables of data) or spatial (based on mapping files).
Coquitlam Open Data
Search for data or explore popular data categories to preview, analyze and download datasets. Using the available APIs, you can interact with data directly through your own maps, tables and charts. You can also download city-wide data packages, LiDAR, aerial photographs, terrain and 3D digital elevation models.

For databases in your subject area, visit the Open Educational Resources page in your discipline's Subject Guide.

Agricola This link opens in a new window
AGRICOLA contains bibliographic records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library. This database contains more than 4.8 million citations.
Subject: Agriculture and allied disciplines e.g. forestry, food, and plant and animal sciences.
BioMed Central This link opens in a new window
Contains full text, peer-reviewed articles. The research articles are all open access, meaning that they are "immediately and permanently available online without charge".
Subject: Biology and medicine.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
There are more than 6000 journals in the directory. Currently more than 2500 journals are searchable at the article level.
Subject: All subject areas.

See Open Textbooks.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Discover 48,510,361 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
Flickr *
Largest photo sharing site. Be sure to use advanced search and select for Creative Commons licensed images.
Google Advanced Image Search
Filter results by usage rights i.e. "free to use or share"
Indige
Collection of open-source photos of Indigenous students for use in OER. All photos have a CC BY NC SA license.
Indigenous Education Stock Photos
Collection of open-source photos of Indigenous students for use in OER. All photos have a CC BY NC SA license.
Openverse *
Indexes over 600 million items, Openverse searches Creative Commons licensed and public domain content from dozens of different sources.
Pexels *
Free stock photos & videos you can use everywhere. Browse millions of high-quality royalty free stock images & copyright free pictures.
Pixabay *
A large collection of images that can have a creative commons licence. All images are free.
Smithsonian Open Access
Download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images.Access nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
UK Human Development Institute
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.
UBC Image Sources *
Public Domain and Creative Commons Resources
Unsplash
Beautiful, free photos. Gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers.
Wikipedia Commons *
Freely usable media files (images, audio, video). Check the image summary for details on permitted use.

Bensound
Royalty free music for use in multimedia projects ("free license" with some limitations).
Big Sound Bank
BigSoundBank.com is a library of royalty-free, free of charge, and public domain sounds.
ccMixter
Music is uploaded by musicians with either a CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or purchasable copyrighted music.
Creative Commons Content Directories
Lists websites providing images, music, video, and text that use Creative Commons licensing.
Free Hip Hop Beats
Downloadable hip hop beats covered under a Creative Commons License that requires audio attribution.
Free Music Archive
Visitors are able to browse, listen and download music for free.
Free PD
Free PD offers music that is available for commercial use and has a Creative Commons 0 license.
Free Sound
Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds
Internet Archive
Access to downloadable video, audio, text & multimedia in the public domain.
Jamendo
All music on Jamendo is free to download and can be shared or modified depending on how each specific piece of music has been licensed.
Musopen
Musopen provides recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions.
Petrucci Music Library
A wiki-based repository of musical scores available in the public domain.
YouTube Audio Library for Creators
Royalty and/or Copyright free music, conditions of use vary. You will need a YouTube account to download them. Sign in to see the channel with options for download.

Alhazeera Creative Commons Repository
The Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository hosts select broadcast quality media that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses.
Critical Commons
Critical Commons is a public media archive and fair use advocacy network that supports the transformative reuse of media in scholarly and creative contexts.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Discover 48,510,361 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States.
Internet Archive
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
TED
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).
Video Lectures
An open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by scholars and scientists at events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.
Vimeo
Vimeo allows content creators to add a creative commons license to their videos. These videos can be searched for using the advanced search filter.
YouTube Education
YouTube allows content creators to add a creative commons licence to their videos.

Search for a range of OER materials including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics.

The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites, with the Mason OER Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.

CC BY-SA 2.0 opensourceway

Course Packs

B.C. Open Collection: New Course Packs Now Available

Since 2012 BCcampus has actively supported the use, creation, and adaptation of open textbooks in B.C. This has resulted in more than $30 million in student savings over 10 years. With the pandemic and rapid switch to remote online teaching, we looked for ways open education could support faculty in that transition. One approach was to fund the development of open course packs designed to have all the materials an instructor would need to teach an online course, such as a syllabus, instructor guide, activities, assignments, and assessments. Because the course packs are openly licensed, instructors can customize the materials to their needs.

Course Packs

Course Packs
Course Packs in the B.C. Open Collection by BCcampus