Finding OER

OER Repositories

OER repositories contain more than just open textbooks. All content featured here is free but usage rights vary. Some materials in these repositories are released under a Creative Commons license while others are in the public domain. You’ll find a variety of resources located in the portals below, including activities, assessments, games, lesson plans, and more.

  • Lumen Learning
    Supports faculty in identifying and selecting high quality OER, aligning these to learning outcomes, and assembling them to create OER-based courses.
  • MERLOT II
    Free, peer reviewed collection of online teaching and learning materials maintained by the California State University System.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare
    A web-based publication of materials from thousands of MIT courses. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
  • OER Commons
    Funded by ISKME, OER Commons is a library of OER materials containing over 50,000 high-quality OER.
  • Open Course Library
    Collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments.
  • Open Courseware Consortium
    Free and open collection of high-quality learning materials presented in the form of courses.
  • Open Michigan
    A hub that helps people find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space to share their educational content. through partnerships with community of schools & colleges, campuses, faculty, students and alumni.
  • Openstax CNX (formerly Connexions)
    Contains textbooks, articles, supplements, and other learning resources that can be read online or downloaded for free.

Open Access Ebooks, Journals, & Articles

  • Cornell Open
    Cornell Open offers open access to key titles in the fields of anthropology, classics, political science, literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
    DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
  • The Digital Commons Network
    This resource brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. The collection currently contains over 3 million articles from over 590 different institutions.
  • Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
    A collection of over 15,000 academic, peer-reviewed books and chapters. Each item has a creative commons license to guide your usage of it.
  • Penn State University (PSU) Press Unlocked
    Since 1956, PSU Press has contributed to scholarly discourse by publishing learned, relevant, first-class works for academics and the general public. The open access humanities and social sciences titles found here continue that tradition and reaffirm our commitment to disseminating vital scholarship as widely as possible.

Openly Licensed Images

Openly Licensed Audiovisual Resources

  • Sounds from Space
    From the European Space Agency, find a multitude of sounds from space. Most (not all) audio content here is licensed under CC BY-SA IGO 3.0. Be sure to check individual credits to make a solid determination of its status.
  • Natural Sounds
    A collection of natural and cultural sounds, from the National Parks Service, that are unique to each national park. Please note that multimedia credited to NPS without any copyright symbol are public domain. Multimedia credited with a copyright symbol (indicating that the creator may maintain rights to the work) or credited to any entity other than NPS must not be presumed to be public domain; contact the host park or program to ascertain who owns the material.
  • Librivox
    A library of free public domain audiobooks. 
  • Internet Moving Image Archive
    This library contains digital movies uploaded by users, which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Users are encouraged to add Creative Commons licenses to their movies, so please check individual movies to ensure it is openly licensed for your use.
  • TED Talks and TED Ed
    TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). Most TED Talks have a creative commons license. Read more about TED’s usage policy here.

© James & Abigail Campbell Library at the University of Hawaiʻi - West Oʻahu