Library Research Guides: Open Access Resources: Free Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER)

The Library has collated an Open Textbooks collection for educators looking for available open textbooks for their classes.

Free Resources

Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.

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All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.
Fordham University Source Books
Links to full texts of books available at this and other sites will be listed here. The texts are also integrated within the overall structure of the Sourcebook. This listing is to aid compilers of web guides to online books, etc. The books that tend to have been put online here, or those that have been linked, tend to be those entire books that are often assigned to students in college classes to be read along with the more usual excerpted texts.
Hathi Trust Digital LIbrary
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitised from libraries around the world.
MIT Press Direct
MIT Press Direct offers a growing collection of eBooks covering a wide range of subjects including architecture, business, humanities, social science, bio-medical, education, data science, environment and game studies.
NCBI Bookshelp
Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Search, read, and discover..
OAPEN - Open Access Publishing in European Networks
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
Open Book Publishers
A leading independent OA publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences : a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars. All books are available to read online and download for free with no Book Processing Charges (BPCs). OpenBooks publish monographs and textbooks in all disciplines.
Open Stax
OpenStax breaks down barriers to knowledge and education with its free, high-quality, openly licensed textbooks integrated with personalised learning technology.
Open Textbook Library
These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost.
Page by Page Books
Hundreds of classic books you can read right now, all absolutely free! It is an ideal way to expand your horizons, catch up on your reading list, or read books that it seems like everyone else has already read. Fix yourself a drink, get comfortable and Start Reading!
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: Most Project Gutenberg ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.
Project Gutenberg Australia
Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: Most Project Gutenberg ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.
Project Muse - Open Access
Selected books on Project Muse are available open access. Learn more.
Read Print
A large collection of fiction by American and British authors
Standard ebooks
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Standard Ebooks is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, and free.

CORE Discovery
CORE harvests research papers from data providers from all over the world including institutional and subject repositories, open access and hybrid journal publishers.
CORE currently contains 175,477,276 open access articles.

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It’s free to install CORE Discovery in your browser. Using Google Chrome or Chromium, open the extension page on Web Store and click on the “Add to Chrome” button to install the extension.
Open Access button
From the OA Button’s website, you can enter an article’s URL, DOI (a unique identifier), title, or other information to check for free and legal open access versions. The OA Button also offers Chrome and Firefox extensions. Once installed, these extensions will automatically search for an open access copy. When an open access copy is not found, the OA Button can enable contact with the author.
Unpaywall
Unpaywall consists of a database that includes a list of almost 20 million freely available scholarly articles. Most researchers access it using a browser plug-in that was released in 2017. The service works by searching for a queried paper’s unique digital tag — a string of numbers and letters known as its DOI, or digital object identifier — against those of articles gathered from 50,000 journals and repositories.

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Open Access Journals from Wiley
Wiley Open Access journals cover a range of disciplines.
The Public Domain
The Public Domain Review is an online journal dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
University OA Journals
This list of Australian & New Zealand journals is provided by Open Access Australasia.

APO
APO makes public policy research visible, discoverable and usable.

AustLii This link opens in a new window
Major web site in Australian cases and legislation. It also has comprehensive links to international and other Australian legal sites.
Australian Bureau of Statistics This link opens in a new window
ABS products and services

Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

BioMed Central This link opens in a new window
A collection of open access peer-reviewed biomedical research journals providing access to current original research
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Legislation.gov.uk This link opens in a new window
Legislation from across the United Kingdom in one place. Online database of UK Statute Law. Contains primary and secondary UK legislation.
Medscape This link opens in a new window
Freely available medical and health database with links to full text information.

Requires an initial free registration.
National Construction Code of Australia This link opens in a new window
Incorporates the BCA Volume One, BCA Volume Two and the Guide to the Building Code of Australia (BCA) plus the Plumbing Code of Australia (PCA, Volume Three).

This product is free to use but individual registration is required on the site. Click on the yellow button at the top right and register for a username and password.
NATLEX This link opens in a new window
NATLEX is a database of national labour, social security and related human rights legislation.

OA University Repositories
This Australian & New Zealand list is provided by Open Access Australasia.

OECD iLibrary This link opens in a new window
The online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, papers and statistics and the gateway to OECD’s analysis and data. OECD iLibrary also contains content published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and the International Transport Forum (ITF).

Bond University does not subscribe to OECD iLibrary and therefore not all content is available.
REHABDATA This link opens in a new window
Collection of databases on disability and rehabilitation. Contains references to documents covering technology, law, employment and other issues as they relate to people with disabilities.

Codecademy
Learn to code for free
Coursera - Top Free Courses
edX
Free online courses from Harvard, MIT and more.
Future Learn
Free courses with options to pay for certificates, or extended access.
Khan Academy
Free education for anyone, anywhere
The New Boston
Programming, web technology free tutorials from the New Boston Youtube channel.
Udemy
Selected courses at Udemy are available for free.
Youtube Learning
A YouTube channel including how to's, DIY, tutorial and educational videos.
EOL Encyclopedia of Life
The Encyclopedia of Life Learning + Education website (EOL L+E) is part of the larger EOL collaborative. EOL L+E works with educators, citizen scientists and partners to make this information accessible through free tools, services and resources.

Atlas of Living Australia This link opens in a new window
The Atlas of Living Australia has been developed to build a better picture of the Australian biosphere. There are over 23 million records on the distribution of Australia’s fauna and flora, in addition to maps, images and literature.

ccMixter
ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.
digccMixter
Find out why one out of six uploads to digccMixter are used in a YouTube(tm) video, flickr moving image, podcast, compilation album and thousands of other places all over the web.
Use of the music requires attribution.
Free Music Archive
This site offers free downloads under Creative Commons and other licences. See the track page to discover what you can and cannot do with each track.

Jamendo This link opens in a new window
Free, creative commons licensed music.

Moving Image Archive
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.

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This collection is free and open for everyone to use.
NASA
NASA has a large collection of current and historical astronomy related images to browse through. The images are generally not copyrighted and are available for educational and informational use. The images are all high resolution and file sizes can be quite large so images may need to be resized for use.
New York Public Library
This public domain collection spans the breadth and depth of NYPL's holdings, from the Library's rich New York City collection, historic maps, botanical illustrations, unique manuscripts, photographs, ancient religious texts, and more.
Open Images
Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse. An initiative of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.
opSound
Listeners are invited to download, share, remix, and reimagine.
Paris Musees
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Paris Musées offers Open Content (free and unrestricted availability) to more than 150,000 digital reproductions of works from the collections of the museums of the City of Paris in high definition.
Pixabay
A repository for outstanding public domain images
Pixnio
Pixnio contains public domain images which are free of copyright restrictions.
RiJKS Studio
Sign up for an account to download images of artworks where copyright holders have given permission, or where copyright has expired.
Smithsonian Open Access
Share and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centres, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Unsplash
All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.
Google Images
Enter your topic search, then use Tools > Usage Rights to find Creative Commons licensed images.