Subject Guides: Open Education Resources: Finding Open Education Resources

General open resources

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)
A growing consortium of US community and technical colleges committed to student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources. Contains links to resources on the concept of open education and curated lists of websites containing OER.
Creative Commons Search
Please note that search.creativecommons.org is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations. Do not assume that the results displayed in this search portal are under a CC license. You should always verify that the work is actually under a CC license by following the link.
Europe PMC
Free, transparent, and community-driven, Europe PMC is your gateway to life science research. It partners with Pubmed.
Figshare
A repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data.
Lumen Learning
Open courses that support student learning. Includes art, science, maths, technology, social science, English, business, anatomy & physiology, academic writing skills, and more
Mason OER metafinder (MOM)
Searches well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked open educational materials may be found.
MERLOT
access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a searchable, public digital library of open educational resources. You can search by keyword, subject, and education level among others. They have "conditions of use" so you know what you can do with the resources.
OER Knowledge Cloud repositories
Links to a range of OER resources and repositories
Open Alex
OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research system. Its key sources are MAG (Microsoft Academic) and Crossref but also includes Pubmed, ORCID, DOAJ and ROR.
Pataka raraunga: Find data for and about Māori
Improve Māori wellbeing through better, data-informed decisions. All data is from authoritative sources and is shared under Creative Commons Licence.

AI Tools for Research

Find below a range of AI driven search tools to support your academic research. Note these search tools may not find full text articles but you can search for any article title without full text in our Library Search box to see if it is in one of our databases or you can paste the details of any article into Ask Live and a librarian can also check for its availability for you.

ChatPDF
An AI tool that can help researchers to understand PDF files. It can automatically extract text from PDFs, translate languages, and answer questions about the content.
Consensus : Evidence-based answers faster
Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find insights in research papers
Elicit : the AI research assistant
Elicit can find relevant papers without perfect keyword match, summarize takeaways from the paper specific to your question, and extract key information from the papers. Requires you to sign up first.
Keenious
Keenious is an academic search engine that recommends relevant research papers by analyzing your document using artificial intelligence algorithms. It uses Open Alex (as does Semantic Scholar) which is open source. You can upload an abstract of a useful article or your assignment and get it to find supporting articles.

The free version gives you one page of results for each search. Add Keenious as a sidebar in Microsoft Word (Add-Ins / Get Add ins) to get relevant research without breaking your workflow.
Research Rabbit
an AI tool that helps researchers to manage their research. It can track citations, create bibliographies, and generate summaries of papers. Research Rabbit can help researchers to stay organized and make better use of their time.
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An AI tool that helps researchers track citations, create bibliographies, and generate summaries of papers. Research Rabbit can help researchers to stay organized and make better use of their time.
Scite Assistant
Scite Assistant is an AI-powered research tool that helps researchers to find, read, and understand scientific literature. It can automatically extract key information from papers, such as the research question, methods, results, and conclusions.
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. Over 200 million academic papers are indexed.

Open textbooks

2012 Book Archive
Creative Commons-licensed copies of over 100 entry-level textbooks including business, communication, nutrition and sociology topics.
De Gruyter Open Ebooks By Subject
Subjects include architecture, arts, computer science, engineering, life sciences, medicine, music, philosophy, social sciences, sports and recreation.
Intech
"We are IntechOpen, the world's leading publisher of Open Access books. Built by scientists, for scientists". Endorsed by Web Of Science, the world’s leading citation index.
JSTOR - Open access ebooks
Me books
Includes out of copyright New Zealand books
NZETC
Books mostly detailing New Zealand history
Oapen - Open access ebooks
OER Commons: textbooks
Link to higher education open textbooks and supplements. Arranged by subject or provider.
Oxford University Press - Open access ebooks
Taylor & Francis Open Access ebooks
Find nearly 1000 titles in areas of social science, business, health, media, environment, sustainability and more.

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

Open journals

Photo by Sergio Rota on Unsplash

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donation. Journals are searchable by subject.
JSTOR - Open access journals and ebooks
Open Access Journals
Open Access Initiative is committed to make genuine and reliable contributions to the scientific community without restricting the access of published content. This publisher hosts over 700+ leading-edge peer reviewed Open Access Journals.
Oxford Open Journals
The Oxford Open initiative is OUP's open access programme. It includes open access to more than 250 journals drawn from every subject area. Articles will be clearly labelled as open access on the online table of contents page.
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
Over 215,000+ peer-reviewed science and medical articles that are free to access, reuse and redistribute. They strive to bring scientists together and to share their work as rapidly and as widely as possible, to advance science and to benefit society as a whole.
ResearchGate
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Science Direct
Elsevier has over 500 peer-reviewed open access journals. Titles at the link are listed alphabetically. Try using Ctrl+F to search the page for subject or discipline.
SpringerOpen
Springer's portfolio of over 200 peer-reviewed, fully open access journals and over 500 open access books covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences.

Finding Creative Commons Material

Remember not all Creative Commons Licenses will allow you to do as you please with their resource. Make sure you know what license your resource has been given and what it means for its use. See under the Copyright and Licensing tab for more information.