Research Guides: Graduating Seniors: Access to Library Resources: Find Free & Open Information

Open Access Resources

Check out our A-Z list of Open Access Databases here

Check out our guide to finding Open Access Resources here.

Artstor Public Collections
Approximately 2 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from partner museums and institutions such as Cornell University, Colby College, RISD, and MIT.
Black Freedom Struggle in the United States: Challenges and Triumphs in the Pursuit of Equality
Select primary source documents related to critical people and events in African American history. Supports a wide range of students and researchers exploring the ongoing racial injustice in the U.S. and movements such as Black Lives Matter. Time period covered: 1790-present.
Bloomsbury Open Access Ebooks
Hundreds of Open Access Ebooks covering a variety of subject areas.
Brill Open E-Book Collection
Hundreds of open access books covering a wide range of subjects.
Elgar Open Access Ebooks
E-books covering many aspects of law, plus additional subjects in social policy, education, business. and more. Titles with the yellow dots only.
JSTOR Open Access E-Books
Thousands of monographs across the Humanities and Social Sciences. Publishers include Fordham University Press, NYU Press, Cornell University Press, University of California Press, Princeton University Press, and Yale University Press. Growing collection.
JSTOR Open Community Collections
Explore collections of images and primary sources from libraries, museums, and archives around the world.
JSTOR & Artstor Open Access Content
Open Access content in a variety of formats. Search for Ebooks, E-Journals, Images and Special Collections hosted on JSTOR & Artstor all freely available to access.
New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Provides open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs.
Open Music Library
Curated by a community of music scholars, students, teachers and librarians, this OA resource brings together peer-reviewed journal articles, books, music scores, audio, and video recordings from the world’s digital collections.
PEN America's Digital Archive
Online archive of public and private programming featuring the world’s foremost writers, intellectuals, and artists in candid and often heated discourse about the most relevant cultural and political issues of our times.
Project MUSE - Open Access
Open Access Books and Journals on the Project Muse platform. This database applies non-standard use of Boolean operators.

Other Open Book Collections

ACLS Humanities E-Book
Includes 60 open access titles. Books in the ACLS HEB collection have been recommended and reviewed by scholars and constituent learned societies of the American Council of Learned Societies. ACLS HEB is now hosted on the Fulcrum platform.
DeGruyter Open Access
De Gruyter publishes open access books across a total of 30 subject areas in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), and humanities and social sciences (HSS). Today, we are proud to offer more than 2,000 book titles to read, download and share at De Gruyter’s Open Access Book Library.
DOAB-Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Generally speaking, all books listed in DOAB are free to read and share for non-commercial use. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
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All books listed in DOAB are freely accessible and therefore free to read, but this does not mean readers are free to do anything they like with these books. The usage rights of the books in DOAB are determined by the license. Please check the license if you want to re-use the contents of a book.
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is committed to producing a small number of high-quality publications in archaeology, the art of archaeology, North Dakota history, petroculture, and politics & current affairs. The Digital Press is also proud to partner with two journals to publish special supplements and volumes.
The volumes are published, as often as possible, as open access under various Creative Commons licenses.
Our publications are made available as free-to-download or low-cost paperbacks.
Internet Archive ebooks and texts
The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account. Patrons can choose a short-term access for 1 hour, or a longer 14-day loan.
Luminos- University of California Press
Luminos is University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared. Open Access offers the potential to exponentially increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by making it globally accessible and freely available in digital formats.
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University of California Press is one of the top publishers for the academic community. For more than 120 years, it has championed work that influences public discourse and challenges the status quo in multiple fields of study.
Project Gutenberg
A library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education. Most were published before 1924, with some published in the decades after.
University of Calgary Press
Open access ebooks available on the the University of Calgary Press website. Subject specialties include Africa: Missing Voices; Arts; Cinema, Canada, Latin America & Caribbean Studies, among others.
University of Michigan Press
This collection includes 145 open access titles on topics in Asian studies, German studies, media studies, digital studies, among others.
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University of Michigan Press is a leading publisher and distributor of books and digital projects in the humanities and social sciences that are aligned with the strengths of its parent institution.
University of Minnesota Press
Known for its boundary breaking editorial program in the humanities and social sciences, the University of Minnesota Press has now developed Manifold, an innovative platform to publish and read open-access books online. If you want to get the most out of your experience, sign up for an account so you can highlight, annotate, and join in the conversations already happening in these projects.

Open Journal and Article Collections

JSTOR Open Access Journals
Our growing collection of Open Access journals cover topical areas in sustainability and security studies, and offer broad coverage in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Our partnerships with libraries and publishers help us make content discoverable and freely accessible worldwide.

Music and Sound

CC Mixter

YouTube Audio Library of No Copyright Music

Free Music Archive - Check the license attached to each song for rights details.

Jukedeck.com - Sign up for a free account to create your own music. Advanced features available for a fee.

Freesound Project

Creative Commons Music Communities - list of many sites that welcome music with Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons Record Labels - lists labels the produce music with Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons Legal Music for Videos

Videos

Pexels.com

Pond5 Public Domain Project - These videos are believed to be in the public domain. Users are responsible for investigating any existing copyright restrictions.

Creative Commons Video

Vimeo Creative Commons

Library

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Graduating Seniors: Access to Library Resources

Open Collections with Multiple Options

Open Access Resources

Other Open Book Collections

Open Journal and Article Collections

Music and Sound

Videos