Otis College LibGuides: Databases: Open Access Content

What Is Open Access?

"Open Access to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole." --Open Access Week

Open Access (OA) does not mean free access. Some journals may charge nominal fees or impose an embargo period. Many publishers use a color system to distinguish between these different levels.

The OA movement is related to the open source movement (for software and coding) and Creative Commons. All of them help creators define how and when their content can be used and re-used.

"A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access" by Peter Suber
First published in 2004

Suber expanded on that article (plus other writings) into a textbook on open access:

Open Access by Peter Suber
Call Number: E-book
ISBN: 9780262301732
Publication Date: 2012
Published by The MIT Press. In this concise introduction, Peter Suber tells us what open access is and isn't, how it benefits authors and readers of research, how we pay for it, how it avoids copyright problems, how it has moved from the periphery to the mainstream, and what its future may hold.

Find Open Access Content

Start Here

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Search 44,000+ e-books, mostly from academic and scholarly presses across all disciplines.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Covers 16,000+ free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. Aims to cover all subjects and languages.

Additional Sites

Many of the items listed in the sites below are also indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Many books and images available.
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century. ALSO AVAILABLE ON JSTOR
Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL) This link opens in a new window
Curated collection of high-quality content in religious studies and related disciplines from publisher websites, institutional repositories, scholarly societies, archives, and stable public domain collections. Over 198,000 ebooks and 6,200 journals.
Open Library This link opens in a new window
Short-term access to over 1 million books. Must create an Internet Archive account to borrow ebooks.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies (We also license a small number of titles from them as well.) Covers literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, etc.
Public Library of Science This link opens in a new window
Scholarly biomedical journals online. PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

Taylor & Francis Open Access Books and Chapters
Full or partial access to 1,200+ e-books across all disciplines. Includes frontlist and backlist books, including items from the Routledge Gender Studies and the Routledge African Studies Collections

World Bank Open Data This link opens in a new window
Provides free and open access to a comprehensive set of data about development in countries around the globe.

Open Access Content in Our Subscription Databases

These databases host some open access content and include them in their search results.

Most of this content is listed in the Directory of Open Access Books and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
7,000+ Open Access ebooks from 90 publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press.
ProQuest Research Library This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Includes open access content in its search results.

Stock Photography and Royalty-Free Images

Look for resources created under either a completely unrestricted use license, or a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, meaning that you can download, use, manipulate, share, distribute, or otherwise use them for whatever purpose you'd like without permission. It is strongly recommended that you credit the creator(s) of the image, but it is not necessary.

Unsplash
Beautiful, free photographs published on Unsplash for you to use for free. Can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes.
Fotosearch
Stock photography and footage. Images may be licensed for certain uses. READ the terms of use.
Morguefile
Free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use
nappy
Beautiful, high-resolution photographs of black and brown people, available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
The Noun Project
Over 1 million royalty-free icons
Open Clip Art
Clip art images available for downloading and remixing; all images are in the public domain
Open Photo
Moderated photo community with the goal of uniting image consumers and producers through friendly Creative Commons licensing. (Royalty-free images, many of which are free.)
Pexels
Free stock photography. Images can be downloaded at custom sizes. Also has videos.
Picsearch
Images available for licensing. READ terms of use.
Pixabay
Over 1.2 million images and videos, available for completely free use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
Smithsonian Open Access
Explore and reuse millions of digital assets—2D and 3D images and data—from the Smithsonian's collections and released into the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license

Open Educational Resources (OERs)

Open Educational Resources (OERs) provide access to instructional content at zero cost. OERs are resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their FREE USE AND REPURPOSING BY OTHERS.

Consider using OERs instead of asking students to buy costly books and/or course readers. You can also use OERs to develop your own course activities and assignments.

COOL4Ed - CSU open online library
Lumen Learning - OER Courses
Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature
Assignment Bank
David Wiley - Renewable Assignments
Open Textbook Network - Colorado State University
Openstax - Rice University
SPARC
Art History Teaching Resources

Consider Virtual Textbooks

Vitalsource