The use of, and production of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA) content is growing every day. Typically, this means that this content can be accessed by anyone on the web, without the need for a subscription or being hidden behind a paywall. For systems like Talis Elevate which rely on the upload of resources, this opens up a wide range of material that can be used without copyright restrictions.
What's out there to help me find Open Access Content?
There are now a number of tools available to help you find OA content. These are typically free to use and help ensure that you're compliant with access to and the redistribution of content.
Unpaywall is a browser plugin helping to identify journal publications that are available as open access resources. The full text articles they find there have been legally uploaded by authors, with permission from publishers.
There's lots of content to be found through JSTOR as well, including journals, books, and image based content.
Where can I find Open Access resources?
This is not an exhaustive list, but here are a few locations to get you started:
Open Access journal articles
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. There are over 5 Million articles on DOAJ at time of writing.
CORE
CORE is a non-profit service delivered by the Open University and Jisc which provides access to the largest collection of Open Access research papers.
JISC OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)
OpenDOAR is a quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. You can search and browse through thousands of registered repositories based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
Gates Open Research
Gates Open Research is a platform for rapid author-led publication and open peer review of research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
BASE
BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 150 million documents from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
Books
Project Gutenburg
45,000 free e-books. An American project which cannot publish any texts still in copyright. This generally means that the texts are taken from books published pre-1923, so don't be expecting the latest edition prints or modern classics!
Bloomsbury Collections
Open Book Publishers
Open access images
- CCsearch has over 500 million images available for re-use.
- ArtStor is a fabulous resource for imagery, specifically for use within an educational context. Institutions are asked to join the community, but there's also a public collection in case you can't do that right now .
- Wikimedia Commons is a media repository which hosts images, sound and video clips under a number of open licences.
- Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license; you can browse or search through content under each type of license. They also have an area called "The Commons", designed to bring together photographic communities and document the real world for all to see.
- Everystockphoto searches millions of freely licensed photos from various sources and presents them in an integrated search.
- VADS has a portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 100,000 images that are freely available for use in learning, teaching and research in the UK. This is particularly great for art, history, etc.
Other resources
Parliamentary content
There's some really clear guidance on parliamentary copyright at: https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright/
Essentially, you are allowed to use Hansard, government legislature, and video/audio content in Talis Elevate. For video content, you can download up to 5 clips a day from https://parliamentlive.tv/