Research Guides: Faculty Services: Open Educational Resources

OER Resources

Open Textbook Library OTL, with over 350 books, is a clearinghouse of links to books in various locations, including OpenStax, Saylor and others. Books in the OTL have been peer reviewed for quality, and the Open Textbook Library has multiple criteria for inclusion in the Library.
https://openstax.org/ These books were developed following traditional textbook publishing methods, including peer review, editorial support, and creation of ancillary content. Books are available in multiple formats (PDF, print on demand, on the Web) and are licensed to be revised and remixed by faculty who want create a custom solution for a course.
Saylor.org Bookshelf This collection includes books written specifically for Saylor.org as well as the original editions of the FlatWorldKnowledge textbooks (subsequent editions are only offered for purchase). You can view all their resources by subject area in their library.
Project Gutenberg A volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works. Most items in this collection are digitized works from the public domain, making it a rich source for those in the Humanities
BC Campus OpenEd This site includes texts written specifically for the BC OpenTextbook initiative, as well as books from other sources.
Directory of OpenAccess Books This site is a clearinghouse of links to books hosted in various locations, and includes a large selection of international textbooks.
Lumen Learning Lumen provides open courses in a variety of high-demand subjects and disciplines. These courses are collections of high-quality OER, not necessarily as a traditional textbook. You can use them as-is or modify them to fit your instructional style and students’ needs.

Educational course materials that have been created by faculty available outside of the institution. Materials can include syllabi, written lectures, assignments, readings, videotaped lectures, and audio lectures.

British Library Images The British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitized by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to the Library, who then released them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.
British Museum Digital Collection The British Museum collection database is a growing collection of digitized objects from the museum's collection. There are already over four-million objects represented digitally, and more objects, records, and images are added each week! Most images are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
French Revolution Digital Archive The Images are composed of high-resolution digital images of approximately 12,000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects of the Revolution. These materials were selected from across the BnF’s departments, and include thousands of images for the important collections entitled Hennin and De Vinck. Detailed metadata exists for the images, so that researchers can search by artist, subject, genre, and place.
Getty Museum's Collection The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required. There are currently 10,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program. These include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. Over time, images from the Getty Conservation Institute will be added, as well as more images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute.
Getty Search Gateway The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required. There are currently 10,000 images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute available through the Open Content Program. These include paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks. Over time, images from the Getty Conservation Institute will be added, as well as more images from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute.
Google Art Project Goodle Art Project provides access to 40,000 works of art from over 250 museums.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (OASC) Initiative This collection provides access to more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum's collection. These images may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use—including in scholarly publications in any media—without permission from the Museum and without a fee. The number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.
National Gallery of Art Images NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 32,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.
Pexels Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages. There are currently around 25,000 free stock photos available, and every month at least 3,000 new high resolution photos will be added. All photos are hand-picked from photos uploaded by Pexel users or sourced from free image websites. Pexels makes sure all published pictures are high-quality and licensed under CC0.
Wellcome Images Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.

Open Educational Resources & Open Access

What are open educational resources?

"OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." [1]

Why use open educational resources?

If you need extra help with a particular topic OER can provide some learning support. Be it through tutorial videos or free e-books. Additionally, it gives the opportunity to independently learn on a particular topic of interest.

Differences between OA and OER:

Open Access refers to removing barriers such as "paywalls". Open Access initiatives seek to make research articles and other works easy to find and read, for free. It does not address copyright, but rather the methods of funding and accessing the research or other works.

Open Educational Resources are works that copyright owners have "opened" by adding a Creative Commons or other License that removes some copyright restrictions. The ideal is to allow others to "retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute" without needing to ask for permission, as long as the work is attributed to the copyright owner, giving credit where it is due.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement promotes the creation of "Open Access" works that are free to use. This includes promoting the use of high-quality textbooks that are free to students, reducing an important barrier for under-resourced students. This reduces the gap in access to knowledge between people of different economic circumstances.

The Open Access movement argues that users shouldn’t have to pay twice for access to the research supported by public funds. They call for free “public access to publicly funded research.”

Loyola University Chicago Libraries

Faculty Services

Loyola Guides to Open Education and Open Access Publishing

OER Resources

Open Educational Resources & Open Access