Open Educational Resources (OER): Home

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5 Rs of OER activities for educational purposes: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute.

Some free resources, such as Google Books or HathiTrust, may appear to be open. Because they require licensing or a paid subscription by the institution to access in full, they are considered paid resources.

The resources included in this guide are free to access and use, and vary from course material aggregators to specific textbooks. 

• archipelagos
• Columbia Journal of Gender and Law
• Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development
• Current Musicology
• Waxing Moon: A Journal of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies
• and more!

To find material from off-campus, consider the following: 

• Creative Commons: Includes images, a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. 
• Directory of Open Access Books: Aims to increase the discoverability of Open Access books
• HathiTrust: Works in the public domain in HathiTrust are open to all researchers, whoever and wherever they may be. Content in HathiTrust is discoverable through online search technologies within the repository and through Google, with no authentication, login, or password required.
• Your local public library, such as NYPL for New York City Residents
• OER MetaFinder: Conduct a search for Open Educational Resources across 21 different sources
• Wikimedia Commons: Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. The repository is created and maintained not by paid archivists, but by volunteers. 
• WorldCat: Contains over 48 million records, covering all materials cataloged by OCLC member libraries around the world

Many Open Access scholarly journals are free for anyone to browse. 

• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): Online directory that indexes and provides access to open access peer-reviewed journals. 

Browse Open Access textbooks: 

• Libre Texts The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
• Open Stax Peer-reviewed. Openly licensed. 100% free. And backed by additional learning resources. Review our OpenStax textbooks and decide if they are right for your course. Simple to adopt, free to use. We make it easy to improve student access to higher education.
• Milne Open Textbooks (Formerly Open SUNY) Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff. The SUNY Community textbooks series is a venue for SUNY faculty to share their already published openly licensed educational material. The work highlighted in this series have a variety of publishers, but are all: authored by a SUNY faculty member; full courses or texts to be used in a college-level course; original work, or a significant remix or adaptation of another open work; licensed with a Creative Commons license, with no ND designation.
• OER Commons OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
• Open Textbook Library Transform Higher Education and Student Learning. Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
• Skills Common SkillsCommons’ mission is to accelerate the democratization of education for all through open educational services and resources enabling individuals, communities, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses to prepare people for successful employment in the 21st Century.

​Open Access monographs are being published by:

• Amherst College Press
• JSTOR
• Knowledge Unlatched
• Lever Press
• Open Book Publishers
• PSU Press Unlocked
• University of Michigan Press (requires UNI authentication; use this link to browse without logging in for full access)
•  and more! 

• Anti-Racist Pedagogy Guide This guide, a joint effort of the USC Libraries and the Anti-Racist Pedagogy Organizing Committee, provides resources for developing anti-racist pedagogical strategies and syllabi. Use the tabs along the top to navigate to different categories of resources.
• Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List For 95 years, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has preserved, protected, and fostered a greater understanding of the Black experience through its collections, exhibitions, programs, and scholarship. In response to the uprisings across the globe demanding justice for Black lives, the Schomburg Center has created a Black Liberation Reading List. The 95 titles on the list represent books we and the public turn to regularly as activists, students, archivists, and curators, with a particular focus on books by Black authors and those whose papers we steward.
• Sources for Where to Find Diverse Books We Need Diverse Books™ is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.