LibGuides: Website Research: Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is Open Access?

Open Access Resources are research materials have been made available to the general public, free of charge: data and datasets, books and articles, including scholarly research articles. This is not the same thing as public domain works, or those items that have fallen out of copyright protection; open access authors have chosen to share freely, so anyone can use the works legally without permission or fees. Isn't that nice of them?

Selected Open Access Resources

Affordability Counts
Affordability Counts was created as a direct response to the increasing costs of textbooks in higher education. The program recognizes faculty who take steps in their courses to advance affordability across Florida state universities and colleges.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Nearly 10,000 journals on multiple topics; about half are searchable at the article level.
HBCU Affordable Learning Community
The HBCU AL$ Portal provides any HBCU free access to the tools, technologies, and some services for them to initiate their own AL$ program and learn from their HBCU colleagues.
Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)
The Metropolitan Museum’s initiative—called Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)—provides access to images of art in its collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions; these images are now available for scholarly use in any media.
OpenALG
With iterative texts, powerful annotation tools, rich media support, and robust community dialogue, Affordable Learning Georgia's OpenALG transforms static open textbooks into living digital works.
The Orange Grove- Open Textbook
The Orange Grove repository is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources.
TSU-EXCEL4ED
Tennessee State University's Course Showcase features 52 courses with 1-7 etextbooks aligned with the university's course content.

More Open Access Resources

Open Access Resources
A research guide from Southern Connecticut State University
OpenDOAR
A directory of open access repositories
SilkCommons
Free and open workforce training materials.
OpenStax
High-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.
Merlot
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.

More Information

The Case for Open Access
Position statement from the Public Library of Science (PLOS)
SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Open Access Directory (OAD)
A wiki on open access information by the OA community, hosted by Simmons College
Affordable Learning Georgia
Georgia's Open Educational Resources initiative.