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

Open Education Resources for Physics

OER Collections
OER Information

BCcampus Open Textbooks: Physics
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.
MERLOT: Physics
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: Physics
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.
OER Commons: Physical 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.
Open Textbook Library: Physics 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.

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

Why Does Open Access Matter?

Open Access Publications and Repositories for Physics

arXiv This link opens in a new window
arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprint papers that are approved for posting after moderation (but not peer review). arXiv provides access to scientific papers in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

AIP (American Institute of Physics) Publishing Open Access Journals
List of open access journals currently published by AIP Publishing. There is also information here about how to publish in one of these journals.

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.

IOPscience (Institute of Physics) Open Access Journals
IOP Publishing publishes a number of open access journals in physics, materials science, astronomy and astrophysics, and multidisciplinary sciences.
MIT Open Press
MIT provides access to a number of open access ebooks and journals, and very soon they will be launching a larger initiative called Direct to Open (D2O), a sustainable framework for open access books.
Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics: SCOAP3 Journals
SCOAP3 currently supports 11 open access journals in physics. Gonzaga's Foley Library contributes to the funding that makes this initiative possible.