Open Access Resources

BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
One of the world's biggest search engines especially for academic open access web resources; operated by Bielefeld University Library.

Directory of Open Access Journals
Contains free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

Directory of Open Access Repositories - OpenDoar
OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

Electronic Journals Library
Search full-text, scholarly journals on the internet.

Google Books
Google's searchable book collection.

The National Academies Press
The National Academies —National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council offer “Read for Free” or "Free Download" options for almost all their titles. These are for personal use only.  Be sure to read the Rights and Permissions section.

OAIster
OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open archive resources that was built by harvesting from open archive collections worldwide using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Today, OAIster boasts more than 23 million records representing digital resources from more than 1,100 contributors.

Questia - Free books
Questia provides access to its online library of more than 5000 copyright-cleared books, combined with powerful tools that enable fast, easy research.

Sage Open
Compilation of published peer-reviewed, original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

SOFIA - Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets
Open content initiative.

NCJRS Abstract Database
Contains summaries of the more than 200,000 criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse resources housed in the NCJRS Library collection.

Anatomy and Physiology 
Open Access textbook from OpenStax College (an initiative of Rice University).

Bassett Collection of Stereoscopic Images of Human Anatomy
From Stanford University, three-dimensional photographic images of human anatomy using innovations in dissection pioneered by Dr. Bassett.

Canadian Virtual Health Library (CVHL)
A one-stop virtual clearinghouse of high quality, contextually organized and current health information resources for health librarians and health practitioners.

Health Education Assets Library (HEAL)
HEAL is a digital repository that allows medical educators to discover, download, and re-use over 22,000 medical education resources.

Health Sciences Online
Delivers authoritative, comprehensive, free health sciences knowledge. Search and browse any health sciences topic from over 50,000 courses, references, guidelines, and other learning resources. Materials are selected from accredited educational sources including universities, governments, and professional societies.

Heart Health Animations
From the British Heart Foundation.

John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - Open Courseware
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's OPENCOURSEWARE (OCW) project provides access to content of the School's most popular courses.

MedEdPORTAL
A free online peer-reviewed publication service provided by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) in partnership with the American Dental Education Association (ADEA). MedEdPORTAL was designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed teaching resources such as tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, lab guides, videos, podcasts, assessment tools, etc.

PLoS (Public Library of Science)
PLoS publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals across the full range of life and health sciences (i.e. biology, medicine, computational biology, genetics, pathogens, and neglected tropical diseases).

PubMed
Comprises more than 19 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

SCIRUS
Search engine for scientific information on the web.

Child Welfare Information Gateway
Provides access to information and resources to help protect children and strengthen families.

Published International Literature on Traumatic Stress (PILOTS)
The largest database of publications on PTSD.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN)  
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. 

Drupal
A free software package that allows an individual, a community of users, or an enterprise to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

EdTechTalk
A community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology.

Emerging Ed Tech
Updates and recommendations for the latest teaching and presentation technologies.

Free Technology for Teachers
A blog about free education technology and applications.

Jing
Capture and share images and web pages.

Joinme
Free screen sharing and online meetings.

Moodle
A Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

Screenr
Instant screencasts: Just click record.

WebQuest.org
WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web.

Wordle.net
Used to generate “word clouds” from text that you provide.  "The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes."

ZEN Course Sites  
A free tool to help teachers create course websites for their classes and to share their course site content with other teachers, and students around the world.

Zotero
A free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources. Visit Zotero Screencast Tutorials.

BCCampus Shareable Online Learning Resources (SOL*R)
SOL*R is a repository service provided by BCcampus that allows BC public post-secondary educators to license, contribute, and access fre online learning resources.

Britain's Open University (OU)
Offers more than 600 courses that can count towards more than 250 qualifications. With specially designed introductory courses, students can gradually build towards their first university-level qualification, towards a degree and even beyond. Visit the OU's YouTube channel.

Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative
Freely accessibly online courses from Carnegie Mellon University.

College Open Textbooks
A collection of colleges, governmental agencies, education non-profits, and other education-related organizations that are focused on the mission of driving the awareness and advocacy for open textbooks. 

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
Identify, create and/or repurpose existing OER (Open Educational Resourcs) as Open Textbooks and make them available for use by community college students and faculty. 

Connexions
From Rice University, Connexions offers users the ability to create content as well as to repurpose others' content to include in a course.  Connexions offers textbooks, journal articles, learning objects, and assignments.

Creative Commons
Find CC-licensed works, or license your work.  Creative Commons works offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Free Learning
BC's gateway to Open Educational Resources. Here you will find free-to-use learning resources that you can use to supplement your own course materials or learning. Some of these are from BC-based projects while others are from Open Educational Resource projects from around the world.

Harvard University Library: Open Collections Program
Through careful collaboration with Harvard's distinguished faculty, librarians, and curators, OCP [Open Collections Program] creates subject-specific, web-accessible collections, open to anyone with an Internet connection, that can support teaching and learning around the world.

Harvard University Open Learning Initiative
The Harvard Extension School’s Open Learning Initiative brings a selection of noncredit online courses featuring Harvard faculty to the public for free.

Jorum
Find, share and discuss learning and teaching resources, shared by the UK Further and Higher Education community.

Khan Academy
A not-for-profit organization providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Courses covers math, the sciences, and the humanities.

MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching
MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.   MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

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.

The National Repository of Online Courses (NROC)
A growing library of high-quality online course content for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement.

OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons
OER content is made free to use or share, and in some cases, to change and share again, made possible through licensing, so that both teachers and learners can share what they know.

Open Course Library
A collection of expertly developed educational materials – including textbooks, syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments – in high-enrollment college courses.

Open Yale Courses
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

OpenCourseWare Consortium
A collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. Members include John Hopkins, MIT, Tufts and many more.

OpenLearn : The Open University
Consists of over 600 free online courses from The Open University ranging from introductory to advanced level.

Saylor Foundation
Offers complete, freely accessible packages for college-level courses in business, communications, computer science, engineering, the humanities, math, science, the social sciences, and more.

Vanderbilt University - Center for Teaching (CFT)
The CFT has prepared guides to a variety of teaching topics with summaries of best practices, links to other online resources, and information about local Vanderbilt resources.

Apple - iTunes U
Among the hundreds of colleges, universities, and elementary and high schools on iTunes U, you’ll find Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and UC Berkeley, along with institutions such as MoMA, New York Public Library, and more.

Free Education Apps
50 free educational apps from the app review site AppStoreApps.com.

HTML and WML hybrid adapted Webserver (HAWHAW)
A toolkit to create universal mobile (multimodal) web applications.

MobileMicro
MobileMicro enables libraries to hava a "microsite" - a series of info pages optimized for the mobile web, accessible on any phone and mobile device with web browsing capabilities.

Mobile Site Generator
Tool used to generate a mobile site using the iUI framework.

MyMobileWeb
An open source, standards-based software framework that simplifies the rapid development of mobile web applications and portals.

Comp Fight
Find images for inspiration or research. Note: Not all images are open access.

FEMA Photo Library
These photographs are not copyrighted as they are in the public domain.

Flickr Creative Commons
Photographs shared by Flickr users under the Creative Commons license. 

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
Freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Google Advanced Image Search
Under "Usage Rights", select "Free to use or share." You also have the option to search images available for "commercial use" only as well as for images that may be modified.

Morgue File
The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site.

National Institutes of Health Image Bank
Contains images from the collections of the 27 Institutes and Centers that comprise the National Institutes of Health. Contents include general biomedical and science-related images, clinicians, computers, patient care-related images, microscopy images, and various exterior images.

Open Clipart Library
The Open Clipart Library (OCAL) is the Largest Collaboration Community that creates, shares and remixes clipart. All clipart is released to the public domain and may be used in any project for free and with no restrictions.

Republic Domain
All photos on this web site are public domain.

Stockvault.net
Stockvault.net is a stock photo sharing website where photographers, designers and students can share their photographs, graphics and image files with each other for free.

Stock.xchng
You can use the free images available on this site according to the terms of their 'licence agreement' at http://www.sxc.hu/help/7_2 and any terms associated with the particular image you are wishing to use. Be careful about the images you select - some of them are supplied by organizations such as iStock Photo, in which case there would be a fee.

Wikimedia Commons
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.

ccMixter
Find music for a video, school project, game you’re developing, podcast or just for listening.  Use the dig.ccMixter Music Discovery tool to find music you can use.

Academic Earth
Offers free online classes and online learning tools.

Anatomy Videos - Medline Plus
Animated videos showing the anatomy of body parts and organ systems and how diseases and conditions affect them. A service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

CBC Digital Archives
All information is copyright by CBC, but linking is allowed. Please refer to their Terms of Use.

City of Vancouver Media Gallery
A video collection about the issues, people and ideas shaping Greater Vancouver.

Khan Academy Video Library
Has a library of over 4,000 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice.

Line of Duty Learning
Video on-demand for law enforcement and criminal justice training and education.

NFB Education

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
This website is provided as a public service to promote the spread of good ideas.

University of Delaware Library
Links to free streaming video and audio resources.

Vimeo
Vimeo gives users the option to upload videos to be shared, publicly screened, and even edited (as decided by the creators) under a Creative Commons license.

Webcast Berkeley
Select courses and events fom UC Berkeley.

YouTube (Creative Commons)
YouTube has given its users the option to share videos under the Creative Commons license. Check for videos so licensed.

YouTube Education