Skip to Main Content

SWIC Faculty guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS, developed by SUNY, currently searches open content from 90+ different major OER repositories and includes textbooks, courses, audiobooks, videos, books, and more.

The Mason OER Metafinder searches 20+ major OER repositories and public domain sites in real-time, instantly returning the top several hundred or so most relevant hits from each site. It is maintained by George Mason University.

Search: Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

OER repositories, reviews, courses, textbooks, and journals

This tab highlights large repositories of OER and/or freely available resources in multiple subject areas or disciplines.

This tab includes sites and repositories that include peer reviews and/or accessibility reviews of OER texts and course materials.

This tab highlights collections of OER courses, many of these are from specific state or institution sites.

General or multi-institution:

State-specific:

Institution-specific:

This tab highlights collections of OER textbooks, many of which come from state or institution-specific sites.

An open textbook is an openly-licensed textbook offered online by its author(s). The open license sets open textbooks apart from traditional textbooks by allowing users to read online, download, or print the book at no additional cost.

For a textbook to be considered open, it must be licensed in a way that grants a baseline set of rights to users that are less restrictive than its standard copyright. A license or list of permissions must be clearly stated by the author. (Source:  Varied Characterizations of Open Textbooks by Open Access Textbooks)

General or multi-institution:

State-specific:

Institution-specific:

K-12 / Adult Education:

Humanities/Writing/Research:

Languages:

Prof/Tech:

Science:

Technology:

This tab highlights sites of materials in the public domain.

Public domain means there is no copyright attached to these materials. This term can refer to both historical resources whose copyright has expired as well as to modern works whose creators have released their materials into the public domain and waived copyright.

Books:

Movies:

Please note that open access materials are NOT necessarily openly licensed. In general, you can link to open access materials, but you must check each site's terms of use for any further copyright or usage restrictions (e.g. restrictions on downloading or making copies of materials).

Open access (OA) refers to online research outputs that are free of all restrictions on access (e.g. access tolls or subscriptions). Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed.