LibGuides: Copyright, Fair Use, and the Public Domain: Free-to-Use Resources

Public Domain Resources

Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust Digital Library is a non-profit, digital repository that provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a academic and research libraries. You can locate items in the public domain by limiting your search to "full view only" or year of publication.
Library of Congress Free to Use and Reuse Sets
Items from the Library of Congress' digital collections that are free to use and reuse.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks.
The Public Domain Review
Collection of images, books, film, and audio that are in the public domain.

Creative Commons Resources

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that helps creators share their works through providing standardized licenses that enables creators to give others permission to share and use their works.

There are six Creative Commons licenses that creators can choose to use:

	Attribution license or "CC BY" allows others to use the work for any purpose, including commercial, so long as they provide attribution to the author.
	Attribution-ShareAlike license or "CC-BY-SA" allows others to use the work for any purpose, including commercial, and make adaptations of the work, so long as they provide attribution to the author, and any adaptations shared are distributed under the same or a compatible license.
	Attribution-NonCommercial license or "CC-BY-NC" allows others to only use the work for non-commercial purposes, so long as they provide attribution to the author.
	Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike or "CC-BY-NC-SA" allows others to only use the work for non-commercial purposes, so long as they provide attribution to the author, and any adaptations are shared under the same or compatible license.
	Attribution-NoDerivatives license or "CC-BY-ND" allows others to reuse the unadapted work for any purposes, including commercially, so long as they provide attribution to the author. Any adaptations created from this work cannot be shared with others.
	Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license or "CC-BY-NC-ND" is the most restrictive license. It allows others to only use the unadapted work for non-commercial purposes so long as they provide attribution to the author. Any adaptations created from this work cannot be shared with others.

Creative Commons License Chooser
An interactive tool for picking the Creative Commons License that meets your needs.
Flickr Creative Commons
Images made available by Flickr users under Creative Commons Licensing.
Google Images Advanced Search
Google's Advanced Image Search allows you to filter images by license types.
Openverse
A tool for searching over 600 million items under Creative Commons license or in the public domain.

Open Access Resources

Open access (OA) resources are materials that are available digitally, freely, and typically free of copyright and licensing restrictions.

Directory of Open Access Books
Directory of scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of open access scientific and scholarly journals, the directory is organized by subject matter and is also searchable by title and article.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources across OER databases, the application simultaneously searches 22 different OER databases.
Open Access - MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
Book by Peter Suber, provided freely from the MIT press. Provides a "concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is (and isn't) and showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial."
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier, it searches open content from different sources and contains more than 440,000 records.
OpenStax
OpenStax provides open access peer-reviewed textbooks and instructor materials. Textbooks are created by a team of subject matter experts and receive regular updates to keep the text current.
Open Textbook Library
Offering more than 1,000 open textbooks. Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
Pixaby
Freely available photographs, illustrations, vector images, videos, music, and sound effects following the Pixabay license. Files on the platform are released by artists for both personal and commercial use. See the Pixabay license for more information (found on the FAQ page).
Smithsonian Open Access
More than 4.4 million 2D and 3D digital items from the Smithsonian collections. Includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.