Creative Commons"is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools." Learn more about Creative Commons licenses and how to select the one that best meets your needs at Creative Commons licenses
Public Domain
Not all content is covered under copyright; a large number of works exist in the public domain. Public Domain works are available to remix, copy, distributr, and modify in the same way that the most openly licensed works are. All federal government materials and all works created prior to 1923 are public domain, but to figure out what other materials may fall into that category, you can consult the following:
If you are trying to ascertain whether a book that could be out of copyright has, in fact, had its copyright status renewed, the Stanford University Copyright Renewal Database allows users to search for information on copyright renewal requests for books published between 1923-1963.
Harvard Law School Library-Finding Public Domain and Creative Commons Materials
A wonderful resource curated by Carli Spina of Harvard Law School Library that provides help in locating and correctly attributing Creative Commons and public domain images, audio, and video.
Turning a resource into an Open Educational Resource
Not all Creative Commons licenses blend with one another. These compatibility wizards take the guesswork out of incorporating existing CC content into your own open resources.
Open Access
Open Access is the free, immediate, online access to scholarly research and publications, and the right to reuse and redistribute these resources.
Open Access publishing isn't just for faculty-students are important contributors to the movement and can make valuable connections and gain immediate access to data and discoveries that can enrich their own research.
ROAD provides access to bibliographic records for such open access scholarly resources as journals, conference proceedings, academic repositories, and monographic series.
DigitalCommons@CalPoly is our campus's institutional repository. DC@CP "promotes discovery, research, cross-disciplinary collaboration and instruction by collecting, preserving and providing access to scholarly work created at Cal Poly."
From the website:
"The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). We are funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined us in our mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.
The OLH publishing platform supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal. Launched as an international network of scholars, librarians, programmers and publishers in January 2013, the OLH has received two substantial grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to date, and has built a sustainable business model with its partner libraries.
All of our academic articles are subject to rigorous peer review and the scholarship we publish showcases some of the most dynamic research taking place in the humanities disciplines today – from classics, modern languages and cultures, philosophy, theology and history, to political theory, sociology, anthropology, film and new media studies, and digital humanities. Our articles benefit from the latest advances in online journal publishing – with high-quality presentation, annotative functionality, robust digital preservation, strong discoverability and easy-to-share social media buttons.
Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever."
Collabra is an open access journal in the sciences and social sciences overseen by the UC system.
From the website:
"We think everything in the journal publishing process should be open and shared: research, recognition, reward. That’s why we created Collabra.
Collabra is the mission-driven Open Access journal that shares not only the research but also the value created by the academic community. That means all of us.
Collabra is the first Open Access journal not only to share research but also the value contributed by the research community through the review process. Instead of UC Press retaining all funds generated from author APCs, our pay-it-forward model directly compensates reviewers and editors for their work on the journal. They can opt to pass on their earnings either to an APC waiver fund that benefits other authors or their institution's Open Access fund."