Open source educational resources
How to find creative commons material open access journals and educational resources—including open access textbooks.
Creative Commons material
Use the Creative Commons Search
- Google—go to advanced search
- expand—date, usage rights, numeric data and more
- select the usage rights from the drop down menu.
Find images that are free to use
- Flickr.com—you can search this large image site for Creative Commons material. This is found under the advanced search function.
- Everystockphoto.com—searches images across the internet and displays the licensing requirements under each image.
Open educational resources
The Library at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington has a guide for open educational resources (OERs). OERs are teaching and learning materials freely available online for anyone to use. Different licenses allow for resources to be shared and repurposed by others.
Explore the Library's open educational resources.
Open access resources including textbooks
These resources provide open access to education resources that can be used free of charge in teaching, including open access textbook that students can use at no cost. Please note any attribution requirements of each resource.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- Biomed central
- Public Library of Science
- Health Commons
- Open Access Law Journals
- Open Door Repositories—a collation of open access research repositories from Unversities around the world
- Oxford University research archive
- Saylor Open Access Courses
- MIT Open Courseware—MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity
- Open Stax college—open access text books
- SaylorOpen—access text books
- BC Campus open text books—open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled first and second year subject areas in the province’s public post-secondary system in BC Canada. Able to use or modify the textbooks to suit own course
- Open culture—170 open source textbooks
- Open Textbook library
- College Open Textbooks
- Project Gutenberg—free e-books including historic texts
If you know of some other good open source educational material that is not included in the list above, email it to copyright@vuw.ac.nz.