Open educational resources (OER) allow instructors and students to access, use, revise/remix and share pedagogically appropriate learning materials freely. There are less restrictive copyright licences (for example, Creative Commons licences) attached to OER than there are for traditionally published materials.
For more information about using OER in your teaching, please visit the Open Educational Practices webpage on the University of Saskatchewan Teaching and Learning website.
Resources
Wikimedia
https://wikimediafoundation.org/our-work/wikimedia-projects/
Offers a variety of materials for educational use, such as WikiBooks (a collection of free e-book resources), Wikispecies (an open database for taxonomy), Wikiversity (learning materials and research) and Wikimedia Commons (repository for images, photographs, maps, videos, music, etc.).
Textbooks by OpenStax
Non-profit organization providing open education resources. Designed to allow the collaborative development and free availability of material, it is governed by Creative Commons licences. Content is available from all over the world and users may modify the material for any purpose (but must also be willing to share information).
Creative Commons (CC)
A non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. Copyright owners provide users with varying degrees of access to their works. The organization has several copyright licences which, depending on the licence chosen, restrict only certain rights of the work. Their search page is https://wordpress.org/openverse/.
Creative Commons Audio and Video Content Directories
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Content_Directories
Directories of organizations that allow use of audio and video materials through Creative Commons licences.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
A database of over 8100 quality-controlled scientific and scholarly open access journals, covering all subjects and many languages.
For Students: What Does OPEN Mean for Students?
https://teaching.usask.ca/documents/gmctl/OPEN_ForStudents.pdf
Background information about open educational resources, and some definitions of related terms. Created by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning.
Free Archive of Life Sciences Journals
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
Free full-text archive of over 2.4 million articles in biomedical and life sciences journals at the U. S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
Government of Canada publications (Crown Copyright)
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/home.html
Unless otherwise specified, copyright in works prepared by or under the direction or control of the government of Canada (Crown) is owned by the Crown. However, permission to reproduce most Government of Canada works for personal or public non-commercial purposes or for cost-recovery purposes, is no longer required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce. Permission must be obtained to revise, adapt or translate the work as well as if the work will be distributed for commercial purposes.
Library and Archives Canada Learning Centre
https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/Pages/educational-resources.aspx
Learning resources for teachers and students. Many Canadian books, images and professional development tools can be accessed through the site.
Eastern Kentucky University: Open Access Databases
https://libguides.eku.edu/az.php?t=28
An A-Z database for open access resources.
Springer Science & Business Media
https://www.springer.com/us/open-access
Scientific and professional open access journals and books for Medical and Life Sciences as well as publishing options for authors/researchers. Three types of subscriptions are available to provide different levels of access to materials (the basic subscription is free).
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