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(OA = OPEN ACCESS OER = OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES)
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last edited
by SP 2 months, 1 week ago
Below is a sampling of the more important (all free!) OA and OER websites, repositories, educational resources, lectures, and open textbooks.
Many of these sites originate from the BCcampus Faculty OER Toolkit and similar toolkits from University Libraries; however, a few of the selections below represent my own discoveries of useful resources.
The Database listing below is my own compilation. For this compilation, I relied on a variety of sources, including Libguides, University and International School websites, extensive scouring of the Web for authoritative sites, and months-long collaboration with colleagues overseas.
(A 2021 ACRL Presentation is of interest here regarding Open Access in Latin America: the Perils, the Promise, the Opportunities, concluding with a unique vision for this area of the world: PDF No Publication Favelas! Latin America's Vision for Open Access, by Monica Berger)
TO START:
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MAKING THE CASE FOR OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES:A Publication of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. THE FULL TEXT OF THIS BOOK IS FOUND HERE:
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TABLES OF CONTENT FOR MAKING THE CASE:
- What Are Open Educational Resources?
- Why Use OER?
- Cost and Student Behavior
- Student and Faculty Perceptions
- Student Success Outcomes
- More Equitable Outcomes
- Summary and Conclusions
THE OPEN ACCESS HUB at KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY (Marietta, Georgia, USA)
(Includes Area Studies, Languages, Law, Medicine, the Sciences, Social Sciences, Literature, the Arts and Humanities, and so much more!)
A NEW SEARCH ENGINE THAT LOCATES FREE (ALL FREELY DOWNLOADABLE) ACADEMIC TEXTBOOKS IN ALL ACADEMIC AREAS IS NOW AVAILABLE: https://bit.ly/FTEATEXT
(Created by Stephen Perry for Fulbright Students @ SILC, Spring International Language Center.)
A Definition of Open Access (OA):
"Open access is defined by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) as "the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open Access ensures that anyone can access and use these results — to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives."
"Are you interested in exploring OER for your course, but don’t know where to start? In this webinar, you will be introduced to the basics of open educational resources (OER), free and openly licensed materials that you can adapt to fit your course’s needs. In addition to building a foundational understanding of what OER are and how they can be used, participants will leave with a greater understanding of how to find, evaluate, and integrate OER into a course." (University of Oregon)
"During this course you will learn about what OER is, why it's important in society and education, how to find it, and ways to ensure the content reflects diverse student voices. As you explore the content, you will learn about how OER is part of a broader global open movement which is changing how information is being delivered in society."
INCLUDES EDUCATIONAL MODULES AND TEST YOURSELF ASSIGNMENTS -- to test your knowledge.
RESEARCHERS CAN ALSO USE OPENVERSE to locate free material: OPENVERSE is an extensive library of free stock photos, images, and audio, available for free use. Over 700 Million Creative Works are included
A Slide Deck from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
"This article presents a 3E (Enrich, Extend, and Elevate) model for the effective use of open educational resources (OERs) as well as 10 selected OERs to enhance teaching/learning."
CLICK ON CONTENTS --TO THE LEFT --IN ORDER TO READ INDIVIDUAL CHAPTERS
(from ALA - the American Library Association)
The Importance of Open Access (OA): Advocates and Students Speak Out:
(The above 3 items come from the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA, 72701)
HELPFUL BEGINNING GUIDES TO OER ARE PROVIDED HERE:
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, SUPERIOR LIBRARY GUIDE ON OPEN ACCESS: THEIR GUIDE MAY BE FOUND HERE
To download a free 3-page handout of OER free resources (Textbooks, Books, Scholarly Databases, new Search Engines) for distribution to classes or colleagues, please click here
NOTE: Many more OER RESOURCES may be found towards the bottom of this page, courtesy of the OER Specialists and Librarians at the College of the Canyons: My gratitude and thanks to the College of the Canyons for their meticulous work.
(This article provides leads to free sources of information.)
Top Recommended:
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Open Textbook Library - A Peer-reviewed collection of hundreds of open textbooks, many from Universities, spanning multiple subjects. All textbooks are quality reviewed by faculty from a variety of institutions. New textbooks added monthly, with many more in development.
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SKILLSCOMMONS REPOSITORY: "SkillsCommons is a free and open online library containing free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. The Open Educational Resources (OER) are produced by community colleges across the nation and can be found, reused, revised, retained, redistributed and remixed by individuals, institutions, and industry."
Also see SSRN's Pride Month (LGBTQ+ OER) for current articles and research
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OER BY DISCIPLINE - ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE (please click on subjects outlined in DARK Blue on the very far left of the site)
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OER HEALTH SCIENCES MATERIALS (University of Colorado - Anschutz Medical Campus) "This LibGuide consolidates OER textbooks, modules, videos, and learning activities related to the health sciences including medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, & public health." (from the Preface)
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OpenSciEd: "Our Mission: To give teachers the materials, support, and power to get kids excited and curious about the world around them and confident in their ability to figure it out through questioning, investigating, and solving problems." Detailed Lesson Plans. An invaluable resource for science educators. Instructional Materials.
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TEXAS SCHOLAR WORKS: "Texas ScholarWorks was established to provide open, online access to the products of the University's research and scholarship, to preserve these works for future generations..." Please click on Departments to explore extensive coverage of free, valuable, and impressive educational resources in numerous academic fields.
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OERTX - "launched in September 2020, OERTX is the growing statewide repository for OER in Texas." OERTX offers an incredibly useful search engine for students and scholars.
BEST SEARCH ENGINES TO UNCOVER FREE ARTICLES AND THESES/DISSERTATIONS
Aggregated OER Collections: Searchable Collections
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Cool4ED - California Open Online Library for Education initiative, which aggregates searches across several collections, including SkillsCommons for free workforce development resources.
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SUNY OASIS - Allows search for OER from hundreds of sources. Developed by SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
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MERLOT - Provides access to thousands of discipline-specific learning materials contributed by the member community.
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Open Oregon- Aggregates proprietary and openly licensed materials by course name, institution, and instructor information.
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OER Commons - A public library of OERs with tools for content authoring & remixing. Also provides collaborative workspaces for creating, curating, and discussing OER.
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(from Arabic to Aztec to Haitian Creole to Uzbek to Vietnamese, and, yes! so many more languages are included in this unique guide created by a professional, multi-lingual, Librarian.)
Open Media Collections:
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Search Creative Commons: currently over 500 million images are indexed from multiple collections; and across collections pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works, photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs.
Open Data Collections:
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Data.gov - Comprises U.S. federal data with links to U.S. states, cities and counties with web sites that provide open data.
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PLOS- Science and medicine research articles with images, figures, tables and graphs, all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows for adaptations and derivatives.
. PHET Interactive Simulations -U of Colorado at Boulder
Open Textbooks:
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Open Textbook Library - Peer-reviewed collection of hundreds of open textbooks spanning multiple subjects. All textbooks are quality reviewed by faculty from a variety of institutions.
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PRESSBOOKS DIRECTORY: "A directory of all the books (textbooks, handbooks, and other text-based media) published on Pressbooks, a popular OER-authoring tool." Over 2800 books are currently listed
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LibreTexts - Open textbooks across multiple disciplines created by faculty from institutions spanning the U.S.
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Open SUNY Textbooks -State University of New York’s collection of faculty authored and peer-reviewed open textbooks.
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OpenStax Textbooks - AP-level open textbooks spanning multiple subjects that are developed and peer-reviewed by educators. 854 textbooks as of March 2021, with more added monthly.
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Teaching Commons: Resources created by and (mostly) focused on higher education institutes; provides a wide range of college textbooks, as well as Syllabi in all fields
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HippoCampus.org: The name notwithstanding, content does cover university level; the site is particularly useful for non-text based materials such as video and animation. Has extensive English-language materials, including grammar, writing, composition, developing a thesis statement, etc.
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TU DELFT OPEN TEXTBOOKS (TU DELFT textbooks primarily focus on STEM topics, including Engineering, Construction, Science, Technology, Computer Science/IT, Environmental Sciences, among many other related subjects.)
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SCIENCE BOOKS ONLINE ("Science Books Online lists free science e-books, textbooks, lecture notes, monographs, and other science related documents. All texts are available for free reading online, or for downloading in various formats.)
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OERTX - launched in September 2020, OERTX is the growing statewide repository for OER in Texas. Many Textbooks are included in this resource.
MY FAVORITE SEARCH ENGINES FOR ACCESSING FREE ONLINE CONTENT: MANY MORE SEARCH ENGINES ARE LOCATED TOWARDS THE END OF THIS WEB PAGE:
- GRAFT is an incredible new search engine indexing hundres of scholarly academic repositories
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(PERSONAL NOTE: I've used this new search engine and find it truly remarkable for finding documents and research that I simply could not uncover with Google Scholar.
- GRAFT represents a new type of search engine covering numerous academic repositories as well as retrieving select current dissertations and master's theses.)
- You will see a tiny blank search engine at the top left when opening up GRAFT -- use this to search any topics of interest.
- Try a sample search: CLIMATE CHANGE AND AGRICULTURE AND GHANA (as one very simple example)
MOM = Mason OER Metafinder
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"MOM" searches the following collections:
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AND:
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THE SUNY OASIS Search Engine includes: free Textbooks, Course Materials, Courses, Interactive Simulations, Public Domain Books. AudioBooks, Modules, Open Access Books, Videos, Podcasts, Learning Objects. and Primary Sources.
This NEW SEARCH ENGINE IS A VIABLE CONTENDER TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR
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- (PLEASE NOTE: these free Dissertation / Thesis Search Engines are most certainly not comprehensive -- but -- using them efficiently can allow retrieval of many recent Dissertations and Theses. HINT: One needs to use all of the Search Engines in this listing to retrieve maximum results)
OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY DATABASES: ALL FREE:
AGRICOLA - from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the National Agricultural Library
AfricaArxiv: The Pan-African Open Access Portal: one of the leading Preprint Databases designed for African scientists, and those interested in the African continent.
AN OPEN ACCESS DATABASE AND SEARCH ENGINE that searches over 267 MILLION DOCUMENTS on Scientific and Technical Subjects from over 8,800 content providers. NOTE: THIS IS ONE OF MY VERY FAVORITE OA DATABASES AND SEARCH ENGINES. THE MAJORITY OF THESE ARTICLES ARE FREELY DOWNLOADABLE;
the DATABASE IS EXCELLENT IN MOST SUBJECT AREAS, BUT IS ESPECIALLY EXCELLENT FOR THE SCIENCES, TECHNICAL TOPICS, MEDICINE, and PUBLIC HEALTH
THE ADVANCED SEARCH OPTION IS AN EXCELLENT WAY TO BEGIN SEARCHING THIS USEFUL DATABASE.
("Inspiring discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.")
"The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available
to the world as part of a global biodiversity community."
BioMED Central (Click on SEARCH in the upper right hand Corner.)
CORE: "The world’s largest collection of open access research papers"
Searches close to 210 million papers.
Allows full-text access to the scholarship produced and published by Harvard Faculty, Harvard Librarians, and Graduate Students.
"The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide.
The Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers,conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work."
Well over 16,000 journals are covered; almost all in full-text format. More journals are added every month.
IMPORTANT: Please be sure to click the Articles option before executing a search.
Pointers for using the DOAJ
(For the latest in Social Science and Economic Research, using PREPRINTS are vital)
as of 9/2021, one can search over 300,000 items
"eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools .....includes articles, books, theses, papers, conference materials, journals, and preprints, among other items."
Use the built-in search engine to locate full-text publications and documents on development issues all over the world.
Also indexes the work of NGOs around the world, such as Poverty, Trafficking, HIV/AIDS, Climate Change, Agriculture, Corruption, Girl and Women's Empowerment, etc.
For current updates on the latest free ENGR OER/OA resources, please consult this resource.
An excellent OPEN ACCESS database for searching anything related to Education.
IMPORTANT: Be sure to click "FULL TEXT AVAILABLE ON ERIC" before searching in order to retrieve the full, complete text of any article.
One can also choose the Peer Review option as well.
("F1000Research is an Open Research publishing platform for scientists, scholars and clinicians offering rapid publication of articles and other research outputs without editorial bias. All articles benefit from transparent peer review and editorial guidance on making all source data openly available.") From the About section of the website.
Try the Search "Insulin Resistance and Parkinson's" without the quotes.
GOOGLE ADVANCED (FOR MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY, PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOU TYPE .edu in the SITE OR DOMAIN FIELD OF GOOGLE ADVANCED.
.edu will limit the search to educational institutions; in GOOGLE ADVANCED, one can also limit the search to Powerpoints, .pdfs, Word Documents, Excel Documents, etc.)
GOOGLE SCHOLAR: HOW TO REFINE YOUR SEARCHES A HOW-TO VIDEO
Using Google Scholar; "Discover useful features of Google Scholar to help you find exactly what you're looking for."
----A 3rd useful guide to searching Google Scholar is from a Library Research Guide for Physics: Searching Google Scholar
--- Key Features of Google Scholar -- includes how to do Patent Searches in Google Scholar
(from the FreeTech4Teachers website, published on July 31, 2021)
--- How to Use Google Scholar to Find Federal and State Court Rulings
--- A Google Scholar Trick: Search within citing articles in Google Scholar (from Musingsabout Librarianship.blogspot.com) ( This Blog post comes courtesy of Aaron Tay -- currently Library Analytics Manager, Singapore Management University. His experience also includes E-services Faciliator, Senior Librarian at the National University of Singapore Libraries. My thanks to Mr. Tay.)
--- An explanation of GOOGLE SCHOLAR (noting weaknesses and strengths) from an Iowa State University Textbook on Library Research and Information Literacy (LIBRARY 160)
from the Creator of JURN:
"GRAFT, my beta ‘all known repositories’ search-engine is still accessible, again via the Google-hosted version…GRAFT : a repository search, searching across full-text and records alike."
GRAFT is an incredible new search engine indexing numerous academic repositories
(PERSONAL NOTE: I've used this new search engine and find it truly remarkable for finding documents and research that I simply could not uncover with Google Scholar.
GRAFT represents a new type of search engine covering numerous academic repositories as well as retrieving select current dissertations and master's theses.)
You will see a tiny blank search engine at the top left when opening up GRAFT -- use this to search any topics of interest.
Try a sample search: CLIMATE CHANGE AND GHANA (as one very simple example)
THIS NEW SEARCH ENGINE IS A VIABLE CONTENDER TO GOOGLE SCHOLAR
--A video overview of Internet Archive Scholar
-- A Review here
Formulas for searching this new, free database:
Searching the topic of Institutional Repositories in the Internet Archive Scholar:
"title" Institutional Repositories year:>2015
this performs a title search for the concept of Institutional Repositories for materials published after 2015 --
Another Example: "title" PAUL ROBESON type: article-journal year:>1965 (this searches for Journal articles about the Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Paul Robeson, after the year 1965, where Paul Robeson appears in the title of the article)
Feel free to use this basic formula for other searches you may wish to try in this free, open access database
YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE:
"title" CHINATOWN type: article-journal year:>1973 and Film (this formula retrieves articles on the 1974 movie CHINATOWN, where CHINATOWN appears in the title of articles. ("Chinatown" starred Jack Nicholson as a detective who thinks he has seen everything, and Faye Dunaway who harbors a lurid, truly sordid secret that animates the film's plot.)
ONE MORE SEARCH EXAMPLE: To find articles on OER in the Internet Archive Scholar, where the term OER must appear in the titles of articles for the years 2019 and after, try this search:
"title" OER type: article-journal year:>2019
(OER = OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES)
see OPEN J-STOR below for a description of this database, and a sample search
JURN: An OPEN ACCESS DATABASE THAT SEARCHES JOURNAL ARTICLES, THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
http://bit.ly/2PRyfwB
LIST OF JOURNALS INDEXED BY JURN:
https://jurnsearch.wordpress.com/directory/
from the Creator of JURN: "GRAFT, my beta ‘all known repositories’ search-engine is still accessible, again via the
Google-hosted version… GRAFT : a repository search, searching across full-text and records alike."
In the Graft database, a sample search on the following topic reveals the surprising depth of this new database: Climate Change Deforestation Carbon
ADDITIONAL LEGAL RESEARCH via OPEN ACCESS LEGAL and LAW DATABASES:
ADDITIONAL LEGAL INFORMATION ALSO MAY BE FOUND HERE
More information on the NCBI Database is here
Other Medical Databases that are part of the National Library of Medicine may be found here
One also has the option of searching WorldCat using OAISTER's Advanced Search option if you click on ADD/REMOVE DATABASES, and then click WORLDCAT as an option, should you wish to do so.
SAMPLE SEARCH: COLONIAL AFRICA AND MAPS
You can limit any search to OPEN ACCESS MATERIALS; SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE AFTER YOU TYPE A SEARCH, and then look at the options below your search statement. OPEN ACCESS will be one of those options.
"Cognizant of the challenges faced by students and health workers in developing countries, this site aspires to break the barriers that hamper access to credible scholarly information. It offers a succinct orientation on how to optimize online searching and provides links to Open Access Journals, Lectures & Clinical skills, eBooks and Databases. Additionally, the incorporated OAA Search Engine optimizes your search by yielding results from credible websites with Open Access provisions."
INCLUDES:
A RELATED RESOURCE IS SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: For a more detailed, granular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa,
"The Open Knowledge Repository contains the World Bank’s premium research dealing with key aspects of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. This site contains thousands of published books, journal articles, economic and sector studies, working papers, and knowledge briefs.
The World Bank’s Africa Region Unit has a number of pillars of work. The topical spotlights and subregional and country links below provide quick links into the research output on Sub-Saharan Africa. Project and other operational documents can be found on the Documents & Reports site."
OPEN J-STOR: https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/
“Our partnerships with libraries and publishers help us make content discoverable and freely accessible worldwide.”
OPEN J-STOR INSTRUCTIONS:
and in the first Search Bar, type (as an example) Environment* (* searches for all variations of the word Environment, such as Environmental)
and then to your right, click on the down arrow and select the Title Field.
In the Second Search Bar, type Ghana and then click on the down arrow and select All Fields.
Under Select an Access Type, be sure to click on the down arrow and select “Content I can access” to ensure you retrieve free, Open Access articles –then click the Search bar.
"Search 41405 Open Access articles."
Browse by journal:
PUBMED: HOW TO USE (includes how to evaluate online Health Information)
(from the NLM, THE National Library of Medicine)
includes:
Step by step instructions for setting up search alerts in PubMed
and
Tutorial includes Step by step instructions for setting up search alerts and publication alerts in PubMed as well as setting up publication alerts in BrowZine, JournalToCs, and Web of Science
Educational resources and Lesson Plans, with helpful curriculum ideas for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.
SCIENCE DIRECT: Searches for peer-reviewed journals, articles, book chapters and open access content.
"Searches over 60 databases and more than 2,200 scientific Web sites, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science
information, including research and development results."
Searches over 69 Million articles -- database grows monthly with new research.
The Search engine for this database is available here: https://www.scienceopen.com/search
Please note that: "The default search filter is set to Indexed on ScienceOpen in the last 1 week. If you want to browse or search in all content on ScienceOpen, simply remove this filter or start a new search."
"One of the world's most comprehensive, public science and technology research portal."
IMPORTANT: Under Options, click the down arrow to limit your search results to Available Full-Text.
Searches well over 960,100 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers in all disciplines of the Social Sciences, including Business, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and Public Health; 95% are downloadable in full-text format.
The SSRN Database also indexes hard-core medical and clinical studies, as well as hard-core social science research.
SSRN does cover Research on Race and Social Inequity as well as Coronavirus related research.
Also covers the Life Sciences and Applied Sciences and research on Vaccines as well.
One does needs to create an account to search this incredibly valuable and free database, but, this is exactly like creating a new Facebook account; please do create a login and password you can remember to be able to search this database.
SSRN Year-In-Review 2020
and SSRN YEAR IN REVIEW FOR 2021: SSRN Year In Review 2021 (includes how to submit a paper to SSRN)
("From hardcore medical clinical studies https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3696875 to more interdisciplinary analyses of the legal, political, societal, and economic fallout https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3714304, you're sure to find it in SSRN's Coronavirus Hub https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/coronavirus/")
SSRN - Mid-Year Review for 2022 (June, 2022)
from Gregg@SSRN:
"While I am happy to see signs of improvement on the pandemic front, there are still areas of growing danger and significant other issues around the world. The war in Ukraine and significant worrying global inflation continue to dramatically impact too many people's lives. I hope that you are doing as well as possible.
SSRN has grown significantly over the past year, crossing 200 million downloads to date and closing in on one million full-text papers in the eLibrary. Most importantly, we have recently doubled our monthly capacity and reduced the backlogs we have been experiencing over the past year.
They continue to be an important source of the latest research intersecting multiple disciplines.
As I have said continually over the last twenty years, sharing and discussing research is the best way to solve hard problems and we have plenty of hard problems right now. Please read the research on SSRN and share your research on SSRN - it really matters. The entire SSRN team loves helping researchers share their research because we know it makes a difference. And, share your stories with us through email and social media."
THINK TANK AND POLICY ISSUES: from the HARVARD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES:
indexes articles / documents on the positions Think Tanks take on the pressing issues of the day - along with their ideas on potential solutions-- this database is very internationally focused, so is outstanding choice for students of Economics, Political Science, International Relations, and the Social Sciences in general.
Created by the Harvard University Libraries.
ADDITIONAL LISTINGS OF OPEN ACCESS DATABASES:
I am most grateful to the following Universities for their compilations of the best of the FREE
OPEN ACCESS Databases, Journals, and Resources:
"The OER by Discipline Guide: University of Ottawa is an in-progress tool suggesting open educational resources for specific courses at the University of Ottawa. Its purpose is to help professors get acquainted with existing OER i n their disciplines and facilitate their use. It will be updated annually as new resources are identified."
from the preface to their website.
ADDITIONAL OPEN ACCESS DATABASES and OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS AVAILABLE
The first guide is from Palmer College (HERE) and the second from San Jose State University, SJSU (HERE)
(Includes free databases useful for research on /about Africa)
(this is a favorite of Engineering Students and Professionals looking for free, scholarly resources)
ALSO:
THE U WISCONSIN at SUPERIOR LIBRARY: compiled a very useful LIBGUIDE on OERs, and include some of the more useful and important OER RESOURCES.)
from V.I.U. -- Vancouver Island University -- a very detailed and incredibly useful list of (free) Open Access databases and resources.
Highly recommended!
University of Colorado -- Anschutz Medical Campus: focuses on HEALTH and STEM OER Materials
("This LibGuide consolidates OER textbooks, modules, videos, and learning activities related to the health sciences including medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, & public health.")
(I am most grateful to University of Arkansas Librarians for this listing of free OA / OER Resources -- please accept my personal thanks
NOTE: SOME OF THE MOST REPRESENTATIVE OA / OER RESOURCES, including FREE TEXTBOOKS, FREE RESEARCH DATABASES FOR RETRIEVAL of ARTICLES AND RECENT DISSERTATIONS, may be found in this document: TAMALEFREE and OAD112
(These listings are most assuredly NOT comprehensive -- rather, they are meant to be representative of what I personally feel to be the very best free OA/OER Resources)
OA= OPEN ACCESS
OER = OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES
SEARCH ENGINES:
THE "BIG FIVE" OF OER SEARCH ENGINES:
Just as South Africa has its "Big Five", so I personally believe that OER (currently) has its own "BIG FIVE" of the best, most effective search engines.
They are (in no particular order:)
MOM (Mason OER METAFINDER) -- an amazing new search engine from George Mason University
MOM = Mason OER MetaFinder
The "MOM" Search Engine is available here ( https://mom.gmu.edu)
GMU = George Mason University
The "MOM" Search Engine searches the following collections:
I use "MOM" for the type of academic searches for which I might use Google Scholar, or Google's Advanced Search Engine, or the new Internet Archive Scholar, or the databases and new Search Engines enumerated in this website.
(For example, Openly Accessible Books on ESL WRITING may be found here through the OER COMMONS)
(Another truly amazing search engine from the State University of New York, SUNY)
GOOGLE ADVANCED (NO, NOT GOOGLE, BUT GOOGLE ADVANCED -- HOWEVER, FOR MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY, DO ENSURE THAT .edu is typed in the SITE OR DOMAIN FIELD OF GOOGLE ADVANCED, in order to limit /refine the search to educational institutions.
In GOOGLE ADVANCED , one can also limit the search to Powerpoints, .pdfs, Word Documents, Excel Documents, etc.)
PLEASE NOTE: I do not include GOOGLE SCHOLAR in my listing of my "Big Five: Search Engines:
(Please note problems/issues with GOOGLE SCHOLAR in this essay and in this one and this one)
To be absolutely fair, many Librarians do assert that GOOGLE SCHOLAR can be a useful and effective tool to locate relevant Open Access material, as long as effective search strategies are employed.
One such opinion, arguing for using Google Scholar, comes from this website:
"Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus, Dimensions, Web of Science, and OpenCitations' COCI: a multidisciplinary comparison of coverage via citations
New sources of citation data have recently become available, such as Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and the OpenCitations Index of CrossRef open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI). Although these have been compared to the Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, or Google Scholar, there is no systematic evidence of their differences across subject categories. In response, this paper investigates 3,073,351 citations found by these six data sources to 2,515 English-language highly-cited documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, expanding and updating the largest previous study. Google Scholar found 88% of all citations, many of which were not found by the other sources, and nearly all citations found by the remaining sources (89%-94%). A similar pattern held within most subject categories. Microsoft Academic is the second largest overall (60% of all citations), including 82% of Scopus citations and 86% of Web of Science citations. In most categories, Microsoft Academic found more citations than Scopus and WoS (182 and 223 subject categories, respectively), but had coverage gaps in some areas, such as Physics and some Humanities categories. After Scopus, Dimensions is fourth largest (54% of all citations), including 84% of Scopus citations and 88% of WoS citations. It found more citations than Scopus in 36 categories, more than WoS in 185, and displays some coverage gaps, especially in the Humanities. Following WoS, COCI is the smallest, with 28% of all citations. Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive source. In many subject categories Microsoft Academic and Dimensions are good alternatives to Scopus and WoS in terms of coverage."
To be fair and inclusive, please find guides below for how to search Google Scholar effectively:
Using Google Scholar: "Discover useful features of Google Scholar to help you find exactly what you're looking for."
(from the UCLA Writing Center)
and another guide to searching Google Scholar from a chapter included in Library Research Guide for Physics: "Searching Google Scholar."
(from the FreeTech4Teachers website, published on July 31, 2021)
(from the FreeTech4Teachers website, published on August 5, 2021)
--- A Google Scholar Trick: Search within citing articles in Google Scholar (from Musingsabout Librarianship.blogspot.com, 2021 October) (This Blog post comes courtesy of Aaron Tay -- currently Library Analytics Manager, Singapore Management University. His experience also includes E-services Faciliator, Senior Librarian at the National University of Singapore Libraries. My thanks to Mr. Tay.)
(MY PERSONAL OPINION on GOOGLE SCHOLAR IS BASED ON MY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE ACTUALLY USING GOOGLE SCHOLAR:
My own issue with Google Scholar is that many times it will retrieve incredibly useful citations, but in many instances only provides the Abstract of the citation, rather than the complete Full Text.
The Internet Archive Scholar --noted above-- does provide full-text content. It bears repeating that opinions stated about Google Scholar are my own.)
ALSO SEE:
FROM COERLL: The University of Texas, Austin
Open Educational Resources - The Basics
TWO HIGHLY USEFUL GUIDES TO OERs CLASSIFIED BY SUBJECT DISCIPLINE:
OER BY DISCIPLINE FROM THE LOS ANGELES VALLEY COLLEGE LIBRARY
From the SCHOLARLY COMMONS at the UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC:
AND, also from the Scholarly Commons at the University of the Pacific:
Positive Effects of a Small Grant for Creation of Open Education Resources
The following OER Repositories have been identified by College of the Canyons:
My deepest gratitude to the College of the Canyons OER Specialists who have identified the below resources:
"OER Repositories are websites that house openly licensed materials. These digital libraries typically have search functionalities that allow users to browse resources by entering keywords or other search terms. Some repositories are organized by subject while others are organized by type of material. The most commonly used repositories by College of the Canyons OER specialists are:"
The tabbed sections below include lists of additional repositories organized by the types of materials they provide.
Textbooks:
Images:
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CC Search Beta (Openly licensed still images, music, and videos across several repositories, including YouTube, Google, SoundCloud, and more)
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Getty Institute Open Images (Searchable database of Creative Commons licensed images)
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Library of Congress(Millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps, and manuscripts—all in the public domain for use and reuse by all.)
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Videos:
Courses:
Subject-Specific Repositories:
Some open educational resources are shared through subject-specific repositories. A few notable examples of this type, including open publishers
that specialize in one discipline, are listed below:
Attributions (College of the Canyons)
Again, my gratitude and profound thanks to College of the Canyons for these resources.
For Free Journal Tables of Contents in most disciplines, these resources are very useful:
TABLES OF CONTENTS FOR JOURNALS: RESEARCHERS OFTEN ASK HOW THEY CAN VIEW / ACCESS TABLES OF CONTENTS FOR JOURNALS. THE BEST SITE IS THIS ONE
" JournalTOCs is a Current Awareness Service (CAS) where you can discover the newest papers coming directly from the publishers as soon as they have been published online.
JournalTOCs is for researchers, librarians, students and anyone who's looking for the latest or most current papers published in the scholarly literature with international coverage.
JournalTOCs is a free service for individual users.
JournalTOCs is the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains articles' metadata of TOCs "JournalTOCs is the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs): 35,984 journals including 18,014 selected Open Access journals and 12,106 Hybrid journals, from 3835 publishers."
TOC= JOURNAL TABLE OF CONTENTS
FREE ACCESS TO DEVELOPING ECONOMIES: "The following journals offer free online access to developing economies, based on either programs such as HINARI, or on a HighWire-based program offering access to countries appearing in the World Bank's list of "low income economies," plus Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Djibouti, Georgia, Indonesia, Turkmenistan, and Ukraine.
For Free Tables of Contents in most disciplines, I find the resources in this website to be most useful.
TO REPEAT:
SOME OF THE BEST OA / OER RESOURCES, including FREE TEXTBOOKS, FREE RESEARCH DATABASES FOR RETRIEVAL of ARTICLES AND RECENT DISSERTATIONS, may be found in this document: TAMALEFREE (not a comprehensive listing, but, rather, representative of some of the best OA/OER RESOURCES.)
A few of the more important (and impressive) RESEARCH-ORIENTED DIGITIZATION PROJECTS / INITIATIVES -- are noted in TAMALEDIGITIZATION
(TAMALEFREE and TAMALEDIGITIZATION are based on my lectures over a three-year period to Universities, Peace Corps Volunteers, and NGO organizations in Tamale, Ghana, near the border with Burkina Faso.
These two documents are updated regularly.)
ESL= TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
(I DO UPDATE THIS SEARCH ENGINE ON A MONTHLY BASIS)
NUMBER OF VISITORS TO THIS PAGE: 
Website by Stephen
(OA = OPEN ACCESS OER = OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES)
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