Research Guides @ Fordham: Copyright Resources: Open Educational Resources (OER)

What is an Open Educational Resource or OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or that have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER confer significant dollar savings while also giving learners ready access to a wide range of high-quality, highly flexible educational materials. Open content offers faculty a means to customize curriculum to better align with learner needs and interests and to collaborate in new ways with peers worldwide.

"7 Things You Should Know About Open Education: Content" via EDUCAUSE.

Recent articles about OER and Libraries:

LeMire, S. (2025). OER Librarianship: Examining OER Librarian Work, Motivations, and Origin Stories. portal: Libraries and the Academy 25(1), 67-86. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2025.a950009.

Lombard, E. (2023). Information Literacy, DEI, OERs, and Library Ethical Imperatives. Theological Librarianship, 16(2), 24–26. https://doi.org/10.31046/tl.v16i2.3251.

Sergiadis, A., Smith, P., & Uddin, M. (2024). How Equitable, Diverse, and Inclusive Are Open Educational Resources and Other Affordable Course Materials?. College & Research Libraries, 85(1), 44. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.85.1.44.

Walters, W. H. (2024). Finding Free OER Textbooks Online: Untangling the Web. Publications, 12(4), 32. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications12040032.

The Five Rs of Open Education

Image credit: ILCCO OER Subcommittee

The 5 R’s of Open Education*:

Retain the right to create, own, and control copies of the content;
Reuse the content in a wide range of ways;
Revise, adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself;
Remix and/or combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new;
Redistribute and share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others.

* Always be sure to check the license the content is offered under and follow usage and citation practices accordingly.

Understanding Licenses & Adapting OER

Image credit: Range of OER licenses by Cable Green et al is licensed under CC BY 4.0

CC License Conditions
From Section II, Chapter 7 of the University of Hawai'i's OER Training 2018 Workbook by William Meinke covering copyright and CC license conditions.
Best Practices for Attribution
CC-licensed materials can be used as long as the conditions named in the license deed are met along with attribution and linking back to the license deed. This link provides a range of examples modeling proper attribution practices.
Open Attribution Builder
Digital tool formatting proper attribution of OER content from Open Washington.
Adaptation Guide by Lauri M. Aesoph
A practical reference guide from BCcampus Open Education about how to customize or adapt an open textbook to fit the needs of a course.
Accessibility Toolkit – 2nd Edition by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson & Josie Gray
A resource to support instructions creating truly free and accessible open textbooks for all students.

Contact Information

Ask Your Library Liaison
There are countless open digital collections for teaching and research offering primary sources or other materials available reuse. Ask your library liaison for advice with locating open collections that meet your disciplinary needs.

Please email Tierney Gleason (tgleason11@fordham.edu), Reference & Digital Humanities Librarian, to suggest updates to this page.

Finding Open Educational Resources

The section contains a selection of repositories and websites for finding different types of OER materials.

A Range of OER Materials (textbooks, courseware, syllabi, modules, etc.)

MERLOT
A project of the California State University System, this platform provides discovery of OER and other free resources ranging from K-12 to graduate & professional level content including textbooks, courses & modules, syllabi, digital collections, DH projects, simulations, and more.
The Internet Archive's OER Library
This library contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China. Many of these lectures are available for download.
OASIS
Search tool enabling discovery of college-level open textbooks, course materials, simulations, learning modules, videos, podcasts, and more developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
OER Commons
Enables searching of OER content ranging from K-12 to higher education & adult learning resources managed by ISKME, a global nonprofit organization. Includes textbooks, courseware, activities, simulations, and more.

Open Textbooks

Open Textbook Library
Provides access to 1,400+ textbooks developed for use in higher education. Supported by the Open Textbook Network and the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota.
Pressbooks Directory
Online catalog for searching 6,000+ open textbooks published by subscribers to the Pressbooks platform. Access note: Once inside a book, click Contents on the top left to reveal the Table of Contents and links. Click on plus signs + to reveal subheading information.

Research Assignments

CORA : Community of Online Research Assignments
Collection of reliable research assignments enhanced by user feedback designed for librarians and faculty who teach information literacy.

Open Access Collections & Resources

The section contains a selection of resources for finding open access materials.

Visit the Open Access page of Fordham's Scholarly Communications research guide for more information about understanding and working with open access content.

Fordham University Libraries Digital Collections
Digitized images, manuscripts, newspapers, oral histories and more from Fordham's Archives and Special Collections.
Creative Commons Search
Searches various websites and digital collections holding images licensed under Creative Commons.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
Explore thousands of digitized items from The New York Public Library's collections including prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
Provides access to digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, films, audio recordings, newspapers, and more.
Smithsonian Open Access
Offers access to millions of images and data across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Open Access at the Met
Contains thousands of images of artworks from The Met collection to use, share, and remix.
Additional Open Access Resources
Selected open access resources included in the Fordham Databases A-Z list.
Open Government Resources
Selected open government resources included in the Fordham Databases A-Z list.

Copyright Resources: Open Educational Resources (OER)