LibGuides: Biology Research Guide: Open Access and Open Education Resources

Why Does Open Access Matter?

Open Education Resources for Biology

OER Collections
OER Information

Open Textbook Library: Biology Collection
Textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are considered open because they are free to use and distribute, and are licensed to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution.
BC Campus Open Textbooks: Biology
BCcampus Open Education hosts and maintains the B.C. Open Textbook Collection which contains hundreds of high quality resources selected for post-secondary curricula in British Columbia and Canada.
OER Commons: Life Sciences
OER Commons, created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources and other freely available instructional materials.
MERLOT: Biology
MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is an online repository and international consortium. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing and making available online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines.
MIT Open Courseware: Biology
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere.

What Are OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are materials used for a teaching and learning purpose that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared by others.

What Aren't OER?

Just because a resource is free to view online does not make it an open educational resource. One of the most important aspects of OER is that they carry legal permission for open use, which is typically defined in terms of the 5R activities (Retain, Revise, Remix, Reuse, and Redistribute).

There are two ways that a resource may carry these permissions: 1) the work is part of the Public Domain or 2) the creator has assigned an open license. The most widely used type of open licenses are the Creative Commons (CC) licenses. (While there are a few alternatives to Creative Commons licenses, they are more commonly used with open software.)

Some examples of "free" learning materials that are not OER:

Library-subscribed resources
Open access articles and monographs (where some or all rights are retained)
Free web-based resources under copyright
Temporarily free resources from publishers during COVID-19

Learn more about OER in Shayna Pekala's Open Education Resources Guide

Open Access Resources in Biology

bioRxiv
bioRxiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprint papers that are approved for posting after moderation (but not peer review). bioRxiv provides access to scientific papers in the life sciences, including biology, zoology, plant sciences, genetics, animal behavior, chemistry, and more.

PLOS: Public Library of Science This link opens in a new window
Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a nonprofit publisher, membership, and advocacy organization that publishes highly regarded open access journals primarily in biology and medicine, including computational biology, pathogens, and rare tropical diseases. Their flagship journal, PLoS ONE, publishes work in all scientific disciplines.
PubMed Central This link opens in a new window
PubMed Central is a free, open access archive for full-text biomedical and life sciences journal articles. PMC is searchable through the PubMed interface, and is produced and maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).
BioMed Central This link opens in a new window
BioMed Central (BMC), a subset of Springer Nature and one of the first and largest open access STEM publishers, provides access to over 300 peer-reviewed journals in a wide variety of fields, including but not limited to biology, medicine, chemistry, and environmental studies.

FishBase
FishBase is the world's largest openly accessible species database of adult finfish. It provides extensive information including taxonomy, species data, geographic distribution, reproductive behaviors, and more. It does not provide information about pre-adult stages but links to LarvalBase for this.

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ includes over 14,000 journals and over 4.6 million articles available from over 125 countries.

Biology Research Guide

Gonzaga University Repository is Open Access!

Find Open Educational Resources

Why Does Open Access Matter?

Open Education Resources for Biology

What Are OER?

What Aren't OER?

Open Access Resources in Biology