LibGuides: Biology: Open Educational Resources for Biology

What can you freely reuse in course materials?

A product in the public domain can be shared without restriction. Works in the public domain include:

Most work produced by the United States Government, see the rules and exceptions here
Works that have an expired copyright (i.e. 70 years after the creator's death)
Works created for the public domain (the creator gives others free reign to reuse or mix content using a Creative Commons license or puts it in the public domain)
An idea expressed in a work or a common fact

A very helpful FAQ page on what is and is not permitted in the classroom due to copyright concerns can be found on the University of Maryland University College Libraries' website. The United States Copyright Office's Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians gives more concrete examples of what is and is not allowed under fair use of copyrighted materials in the classroom. You can read here that the spirit of fair use is achieved in the spontaneity of using materials.

OpenStax Textbook Update

Sites will allow instructors to download, post, modify materials for free textbooks

Rice University-based publisher OpenStax is partnering with OER Commons to provide online community hubs where instructors can freely share and modify syllabuses, homework, study guides and other open-copyright course materials that are made specifically for each of the free textbooks in OpenStax’s growing catalog.

Rice-based publisher OpenStax is partnering with OER Commons to provide online community hubs where instructors can freely share open-copyright course materials made specifically its free textbooks.

See the Biology textbook OER Commons community here: https://www.oercommons.org/groups/biology/1052/

Places to Find CC or Public Domain Biology Content

Public Health Image Library
Drug-resistant Salmonella serotype Typhi
Photo credit: CDC/ James Archer

"Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures. We welcome public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public to use this material for reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages. The content is organized into hierarchical categories of people, places, and science, and is presented as single images, image sets, and multimedia files."

Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Tameeria at English Wikipedia

Unlike traditional media repositories, Wikimedia Commons is free. Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others. The license conditions of each individual media file can be found on their description page.

Encyclopedia of Life
Polygala polygama
Photo credit: John Hilty
(CC BY-NC 3.0)
Source: Illinois Wildflowers

From the website:
Our Vision: Global access to knowledge about life on Earth.

Our Mission: To increase awareness and understanding of living nature through an Encyclopedia of Life that gathers, generates, and shares knowledge in an open, freely accessible and trusted digital resource.

YouTube playlist of 89 biology films uploaded by UMass Amherst Libraries under a CC-BY license.

LibreTexts in Biology offer open access, non-commercial, share alike licensed materials that can be used freely. The materials are developed through a multi-institutional partnership and supported by a National Science Foundation grant. In addition to texts, there are support materials in the form of labs, visualizations, images, and detailed graphics.

The Public Library of Science publishes several open access journals. See below for some of the latest headlines from the PLOS: Biology journal. Their terms are as follows.

PLOS applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to works we publish. This license was developed to facilitate open access – namely, free immediate access to, and unrestricted reuse of, original works of all types.

Under this license, authors agree to make articles available for reuse, without permission or fees, for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute, or reuse these articles, as long as the author and original source are properly cited.

Miscellaneous Collections

Video Set for Principles of Biology I and II
Includes: Metric Conversions, Scientific Notation, Elements, Subatomic Particles, and Ions, Chemical Bonds: Ionic, Covalent, and Hydrogen, Passive Transport: Diffusion, Osmosis, and Tonicity, The Cell Cycle, Taxonomy, Meiosis, Viral Infection, Trophic Efficiency, and Alternation of Generations. CC BY
Foundations of Biology Lab Manual (Georgia Highlands College)
Includes: The Scientific Method, Organic Molecules, Microscopy, Cell Structure & Function, Enzyme Function, Cellular Respiration and Exercise, Isolation of Photosynthetic Pigments, DNA Extraction from Strawberries, Gel Electrophoresis, Restriction Enzymes Fingerprinting, and Mitosis & Meiosis. CC BY

Biology lessons from the Khan Academy. Includes full courses with text, videos, images, and test questions. You can also find many practice questions for preparation for standardized tests. Non-commercial reuse of materials is allowed if you provide the following attribution: All Khan Academy content is available for free at www.khanacademy.org.

UC Berkeley Biology Lectures
Video lectures by faculty at the University of California: Berkeley.

Exploratorium
Field of human red blood cells

The Exploratorium's digital assets are protected by copyright and trademark laws, and are the property of the Exploratorium. Digital assets are defined as content from different media (e.g., photographs, video, text, audio, Web pages, etc.) preserved in digital form.

Unless otherwise stated, you may print or download Exploratorium digital assets for informational, educational, and other noncommercial purposes provided you include the following copyright notice adjacent to the resource, with the URL as a live link in digital environments:

© The Exploratorium, www.exploratorium.edu

BioInteractive is a website produced by the non-profit Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). It hosts different forms of multimedia to teach students the excitement of understanding science.

Search Creative Commons Licensed Materials

Many US government agencies share copyright free photos through social media accounts. The Creative Commons search box above will search Flickr as one of the options, but you might stay up to date with postings if you follow your favorite US government profiles on your own preferred social media account. Check out a few below.

National Science Foundation on Instagram

National Institutes of Health on Flickr

National Park Service on Flickr

US Department of the Interior on Instagram

Smithsonian Marine Station on Instagram

US Department of Health and Human Services on YouTube

US Department of Agriculture on YouTube

One very useful website to find additional biology-specific OER repositories, courses, textbooks, materials, etc. can be found on the LibGuide for the Libraries at the University of Oklahoma here.

Searching on Your Own

You can search the Internet for Creative Commons licensed materials or public domain items. A Google Advanced search allows you to limit your results to items with an open license.

Google Advanced Search Options
When using the Google Advanced Search you have options to bring back results that have a creative commons license assigned to the content. Just select the license that fits your need and put in your keywords at the top to find items that allow you to reuse materials freely.

Other useful features in Google Advanced is limiting by File Format. You can find documents only when you limit to PDFs or Word documents in file format.

You can also limit to a site or domain such as .gov or .edu. A helpful shortcut to limiting your results by domain is to add this to your search of Google:
site:.gov
Site colon dot gov and then your keywords will bring back only websites that end with .gov. Most government documents are free to reuse, redistribute, and remix as works of the US government are published in the public domain. The US government has many published reports and statistics that can be useful pieces of information for any discipline.

Google does not find everything! To find "hidden" content search a known website for information. For example, go to the NSF website and use the website search function to find content.