One of the benefits of OER is the ability to reuse content. In other words, building on what others have done before you rather than recreating something similar from scratch.

VIVA encourages you to search for existing open content that may closely align with your desired work. You can thenadopt or adapt them and integrate into your work. Reusable content includes other texts, modules, videos, images, graphics, and more.

OER Repositories

Based on an OER’s licensing, you can likely use the work without the copyright holder’s permission. This will save you time and effort. Of course, there will not always be OER that you can use straight out of the box, but you may be able to adapt or remix an OER to suit your needs.

Here are some of the main OER repositories you can search:

• Open Textbook Library-Over 1000 openly licensed textbooks are available. Includes post-publication review.
• IntechOpen-Over 5,000 openly licensed peer-reviewed textbooks.
• Pressbooks Directory– Search for other OER built using the Pressbooks platform.
• BCcampus Open Ed
• LibreText
• OER Commons- One of the largest OER repositories.
• OpenStax– High-quality textbooks for introductory-level college courses.

Many additional repositories are discipline specific. As the subject matter expert, you may be more familiar with these discipline-specific options than the VIVA staff.

OER metafinder

The Mason OER Metfinder search across several repositories but not all of them. It is, however, a good starting point if you cannot find anything in the repositories listed above. Use the topics tab on the left-hand side to refine your search.

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

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Advanced Search

Google search

OER repositories are predominantly reliant on self-deposits by authors and those that support their publication. Thus, some OER aren’t found in repositories. While we encourage the use of repositories as most have some associated quality assurance, we also realize that it may not be a comprehensive search. If you want to search on Google for additional content, VIVA supports this option, but we encourage special attention paid to the licensing.

VIVA Repositories

VIVA maintains repositories of OER created by or used by VIVA member institutions. We encourage authors to review these to continue building on the great work of Virginia authors.

• VIVA Open –  OER Commons hosted website that serves as a repository for open educational resources (OER) adopted, adapted, and/or created by faculty and higher education professionals at Virginia institutions,
• VIVA Pressbooks – VIVA projects created on the Pressbooks platform.

Images

There are many places where you can find images that are openly licensed or in the public domain. We encourage you to use open-licensed images so that you don’t need to worry about copyright violations. 

Images searches

• Creative Commons offers a search tool for images, videos, music, and other media. In addition, to help you find openly licensed material, the Creative Commons search tool will help you format your attribution correctly.
• Google’s Image Search lets you filter by usage rights. 
• In Flickr and Bing, you can browse or search through images under each type of Creative Commons license.

Images in the public domain

There are also many, many images in the public domain. Here are a few places to search. Remember, even though these images are in the public domain, you will still want to provide appropriate attribution.

• Wikimedia Commons
• Pixabay
• National Park Service Historic Photograph Collection
• U.S. Department of Agriculture Image Gallery
• U.S. Census Bureau Photo Collection
• NASA

Wikipedia’s public-domain image resources page has a long list of places where you can search for images in the public domain. In addition, the Library of Congress and the British Library have released more than one million images into the public domain. The New York Public Library Digital Collections has more than 700,000 items from its collections online. The library indicates when a work is in the public domain or has “no known U.S. copyright restrictions.”

If you have questions about an image, Tineye Reverse Image Search and Google Reverse Image Search are good places to find information about the origin and license of an image.

Diversity-focused repositories

There are also a number of repositories that are focused on representation of diverse populations. It is important to include these throughout your work to ensure diverse representation so that all students feel included in the classes that use these OER.

Example diversity-focused collections include:

• • Images of Empowerment: Free images of women’s lives and work, created by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Getty Images; License: CC-BY-NC-4.0
  • Allgo Plus-Size: Free stock photography collections featuring plus-size people; License: While attribution is not required, please credit
  • Disabled And Here: Free stock photography featuring disabled BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), varied body sizes/types, sexual orientations, and gender identities in the Pacific Northwest; License CC BY 4.0
  • The Gender Spectrum Collection: Free stock photos of trans and non-binary people, licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
  • Nappy: Free high-resolution photos of black and brown people, licensed Creative Commons Zero (CC0)
  • PICNOI: Free photos of people of color; no attribution required, but can give credit by linking to the site
  • #WOCinTech: Free photos of women and non-binary people of color working in the Tech field; licensed CC BY and also available at wocintechchat.com
  • Redefining Women Icon Collection: Icons of women; License: Creative Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0
  • Iwaria: Free African high quality photos for your projects.

Liz Yata of CCCOER has created a more comprehensive list of diversity-focused repositories.

Other open repositories

• American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action: More than 700 original print-quality photos of real preK–12 students and teachers.
• Open Peeps: Hand-drawn illustration library of vector images. Mix and match to create a unique person!
• Smart Servier Medical Art: Free medical images, primarily illustrations (not photos).
• Biodiversity Heritage Library: Open access archive containing images and documents related to botany, wildlife, and biodiversity.
• British Library Illustrations: The British Library’s collections on Flickr Commons offer access to millions of public domain images, which we encourage you to explore and re-use. The release of these collections into the public domain represent the Library’s desire to improve knowledge of and about them, to enable novel and unexpected ways of using them, and to begin working with researchers to explore and interpret large scale digital collections.
• British Museum: The British Museum’s access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records.
• Cleveland Museum of Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art has shared high-resolution images of almost 30,000 public domain artworks from its collection.
• The Met Collection: The Met (NYC) released all images of its public-domain works in its collection under a Creative Commons Zero license. Look for the Open Access Icon in the lower left of the image.
• New York Public Library Digital Collections: Over 300,000 items in the NYPL Digital Collections have been assessed to be in the public domain.
• OpenFigures: Beautiful, amusing, bizarre, meaningful, or otherwise excellent figures from PLOS papers.
• Smithsonian Open Access: The Smithsonian has released nearly 3 million images in the public domain. Includes images and data from across all 19 Smithsonian museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and National Zoo.