LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Other Affordable Learning Materials

Public Domain

Works in the "public domain" are works that are not copyrighted or licensed at all and legally free for anyone to use. Whether a work is public domain depends on a number of factors: if it is published or unpublished, when it was published, and if the author is living or deceased (and how long they have been deceased). In brief, a work may be public domain if:

It was never copyrighted in the first place.
It is ineligible for copyright.
Its copyright has expired.

See this Copyright Term and Public Domain in the United States chart from Cornell University for a helpful guide on how to determine if a work is public domain.

Public Domain Educational Resources

You can find public domain works in collections across the Internet. Here is a selection of public domain collections that may provide educational resources.

Wikipedia: Public Domain Resources
A collection of links to public domain materials in a variety of disciplines.
Project Gutenberg
A digital collection of e-books, Project Gutenberg collects and shares literary works for which copyright has expired.
HathiTrust Digital Library
A collection of millions of digitized works across subjects and disciplines, with access provided to the fullest extent of copyright law. Although UAH is not a member institution, anyone can access the many public domain or open access works here (approximately 40% of the collection) for free.
Films in the Public Domain in the U.S.
A list of films in the public domain, available for anyone to access and view for free.

Digital Library Collections

Many libraries provide digital collections of public domain materials online, free for anyone to access. Here is a selection of digital collections that include materials that may be used for educational purposes.

Alabama Department of Archives and History Digital Collections
The Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) Digital Collections provide digitized archival materials representing the history of the state of Alabama.
Alabama Virtual Library
The Alabama Virtual Library (AVL) provides all citizens of the state of Alabama with online access to library and information resources. It primarily consists of online databases that provide access to journal articles, reference works, and e-books.
Digital Public Library of America
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) provides access to millions of digitized materials, including text, images, video, and audio. The DPLA's online exhibitions and primary source sets are organized by theme, topic, or historical period. Many resources include teaching guides.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Digital collections from the Library of Congress that cover a wide range of history and subjects, and which include archival materials, books, maps, images, and videos.
National Library of Medicine Digital Collections
The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) digital collections include archival materials, texts, images, and videos in the areas of biomedicine, healthcare, and the history of medicine.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
A collection of more than one million digitized items from the New York Public Library, including manuscripts, images, maps, and videos.
Smithsonian Digital Collections
The Smithsonian's digital collections include over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts, as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, seed catalogs, and audio files. The collections cover a range of topics, from visual art to the history of scientific technology to paleobiology.

Open Access

What is the difference between OER and Open Access?

Both OER and Open Access (OA) books and journals are freely accessible to anyone on the Internet. While the terms "OER" and "OA" may seem interchangeable, there are a few key differences between them:

OER are specifically intended for educational purposes. OA resources, meanwhile, are scholarly journal articles or academic monographs that happen to be open access; they may be used for education, but that is not their primary purpose.
OER have Creative Commons licenses that enable others to adapt, and in some cases modify, their content. (see the 5 Rs). On the other hand, OA articles and books, while accessible to all, cannot be altered by others.

While OA articles and books are not OER, you may choose to use them as free educational materials for your course. Below is a selected list of OA repositories and resources.

Open Access Materials

DOAB: Directory of Open Access Books
A database for finding scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. The DOAB includes over 87,000 academic books.
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
A database for finding scholarly, peer-reviewed open access journal articles. The DOAJ indexes over 20,000 journals and over ten million journal articles.
PLOS
PLOS publishes a suite of peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journals in the fields of science and medicine.
Southern Spaces
Southern Spaces is a peer-reviewed, open access, multimedia journal published by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Southern Spaces publishes monographs, articles, photo essays, and more on the spaces and places of the U.S. South and their global connections. The website includes an educational resources guide.

You can find more databases for open access resources with the "Free/Open Access" filter (use the "type" drop-down menu at the top) on the Salmon Library's A-Z Databases list.