Course Conversion Project: OER and AER, John Jay College
Online seminar with valuable information on how to create zero text cost courses using OER (open educational resources) and AER (alternative educational resources such as library-licensed materials freely available to students). Best practices in course design and pedagogy, sources for open and alternative materials with methods and platforms for delivery as well as issues on intellectual property and academic integrity.
Open Access Publishing, Lloyd Sealy Library Library Guides
Our Library guide on academic research products everyone can access.
Open Educational Resources, Lloyd Sealy Library Library Guides
Zero-Cost (to students) Textbook Alternatives:
Our Library's guide with a wealth of information and links to freely available teaching and learning materials. Information on Finding Library and Open Educational Resources, OER Resources and Courses by John Jay and CUNY Faculty, OER Resources by Discipline, and Fair Use and Copyright.
The Academic Commons of The City University of New York is designed to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning by providing a free exchange of knowledge among colleagues across the university and sharing replicable materials and best practices.
CUNY Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing free access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work from the City University of New York community.
OpenEd CUNY is a curated digital library of open educational resources. Includes a search engine to find resources, avenues to connect with fellow CUNY educators on all things OER and an introduction to and tutorial on Open Author to create and/or remix OER materials.
Open Educational Resources (Libguide), Leonard Lief Library, Lehman College
Open Educational Resources and Zero-Cost Learning, CUNY Office of Library Services
CUNY OER Services from the Office of Library Services and campuses across CUNY including listing of CUNY Library Resources across campuses, free digital resources and links to various resources for help in creating OER courses.
Please consult our Library's Fair Use and Copyright research guide as well as referring to CUNY's Office of Library Services' page on Fair Use in the Context of Covid-19 where they summarize a Statement on Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research recently released by library copyright specialists.
Academic Presses and Institutions, The Online Books Page
Listing with links to academic presses and institutions with substantial numbers of free online books.
American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside
An open educational resource with over 450 prison newspapers published from U.S. prisons, some of which are still being published today. American Prison Newspapers provides a collection of these newspapers which represents "penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women's-only institutions." New content will be added regularly.
Open access scholarly articles and research papers from institutions worldwide made available to the public.
The Digital Commons Network provides free access to full-text open access research and scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Find peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and more. Browse by discipline, search keywords and follow authors and publications.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Material from America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All material, including photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and more, are free and immediately available.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
The Directory of Open Access Books provides open access to over 854 academic and peer-reviewed books. Search for a specific title or browse by subject. All books listed in DOAB are freely accessible and able to share for non-commercial use (usage rights are determined by the item's license so please check license for re-use information).
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Directory of Open Access Journals is a collection of approximately 12000 quality, peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.
HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving and providing access to 17+ million public domain and in-copyright digitized items from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
A non-profit, academic social networking site providing pen-access, open-source articles, monographs, book chapters, course materials, conference papers and more by humanities researchers available to read and download for free without registration.
The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free Internet Archive virtual library account. Sign up for a free Internet Archive account.
A cooperative repository of learning materials collected and contributed by MERLOT Members. Tens of thousands of discipline-specific material (books, journals, library resources and webpages) all reviewed for suitability and many reviewed by peers.
NCBI Bookshelf (National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine)
Free online access to to a collection of ebooks and documents in the fields of life sciences and healthcare. Bookshelf does not claim copyright on these materials-- it remains with copyright holder. U.S. government agency books are in the public domain.
Founded and edited by John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania, The Online Books Page is a portal that facilitates access to open access, freely readable books on the Internet.
Project MUSE provides open access books and journals from university presses and scholarly societies with materials freely available to libraries and users around the world.
Open access to free, openly-licensed textbooks--use, adapt and distribute freely. Download at no cost and print at low cost. All textbooks are affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. Currently includes 721 textbooks, with more being added all the time.
OpenStax
OpenStax is part of Rice University. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.
Open access site with educational content. Faculty may adapt, customize and/or create content that is accessible and interactive.
Open access library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Use a free epub or Kindle eBooks to download or read online. Features world's great literature with a focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. No fee. No registration. No special app needed.
Open access to reprints of working papers, unpublished work, and articles under review from scholars in the field of psychology.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, the Public Books database provides a collection of freely accessible online materials from academic presses.
PMC is a free full text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine, serving as a digital counterpart to their extensive print collection.
Free, non-profit, open access site for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers. Search using keywords/phrases or browse major subject categories.
Open access repository dedicated to research in sport, exercise studies, rehabilitation and therapy through theatre, dance, and performance studies.
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain.
OASIS or Openly Available Sources Integrated Search is a search tool for open access materials developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library. It currently searches content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.
Mason OER Metafinder is a search tool to help find Open Educational Resources. Instead of searching a static database, Mason OER Metafinder performs a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different OER resources resulting in up-to-th-minute results. Because of that, it may take a bit longer than other searches.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)Browse over 500 million images (openly licensed and public domain works) available for reuse from Creative Commons.
Finding Open Access Images, Penn Libraries LibGuide
Information on using images in the public domain, different types of licensing and how to attribute those images. Links to sites providing open access images in the public domain, under creative commons licensing, or government sites (some of which may have some restrictions for use).
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Visit the Museum Library's Virtual Resources page for AMNH Scientific Publications, Anthropological Papers, Digitized Scientific Manuscripts and Digital Special Collections (historic and current images documenting the Museum's activities and collections).
British Museum, London, England
Guggenheim, New York
Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa
Louvre, Paris, France
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Museum of the City of New York
National Archeological Museum, Athens, Greece
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington, DC
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
New York Historical Society Museum & Library
Paris Musées, a collection of 14 museums in Paris, offer free access to high-res digital copies of 100,000 artworks from their collections. Artists include Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, Cézanne, and thousands of others.
Prado Museum (Museo Nacional del Prado), Madrid, Spain
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Uffiizi Galleries, Florence, Italy
Photographic Archive and Inventories
Schaltegger, M. (2020, March 13). These iconic museums offer virtual tours perfect for when you're stuck at home. Thrillist. Retrieved from https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/virtual-museum-tours
(in part from the Hunter College Library webpage)