Open Educational Resources, Open Access, Creative Commons and Public Domain

Open Educational Resources, or OER, are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost. Unlike fixed, copyrighted materials, OER have been authored and created with the intention of retain few, if any, ownership rights.

In general, you are able to download a resource, edit in some way and re-post it as a remixed work. OER typically have a Creative Commons license which indicates how the material can be used.

An OER can be a Textbook, Tutorial, Video, Quiz, Syllabus and more!

Visit our Open Education Research Guide for more information.

Open Access is the free, unrestricted access to digital materials, such as research articles and software. In addition, rights are granted to use the content freely in the digital environment. It also describes a type of publishing model that makes research and journal articles freely available. You may see some articles flagged as "Open Access" when searching the Library's "Search Everything" tool. These articles are free to use for anybody.

Creative Commons is a type of licensing that allows for certain rights to use a work (e.g., modify, share, etc.) under certain conditions (e.g., for non-commercial use only, only if the resulting work is similarly shared, etc.). The creator specifies how their work can be used by applying the license of their choice. In some cases, Creative Commons-licensed materials can be freely used, shared or modified. Always check the license to see what is required in order to use the work. For example, you may be required to give credit to the creator, to share the resulting work in the same way or may not be able to use the work for commercial purposes.

Rather than locking down a work, as Copyright automatically does, Creative Commons licensing allows the copyright owner to choose how the work is used!

Public Domain works are works whose copyright has expired and so people are free to use, share, modify, copy, or adapt these works.

  •  As of December 30, 2022, works enter the public domain in Canada 70 years after the author’s death on January 1st of the year following the expiration of the copyright
  •  Before December 30, 2022, works entered the public domain in Canada 50 years after the death of the author and remain in the public domain, despite the change.
  •  Note that if a work in the public domain is modified into a new work, the modified work is protected by copyright. For example, if an artist modifies a photograph in the public domain, thereby creating a new work, that new work is protected under copyright. Also, sometimes parts of a public domain work may still be protected by copyright, for example, a drawing within a novel. For these reasons, it can be complicated to determine if a work is in the public domain; please reach out to the Library if you are unsure how you can legally use a work.

Public Domain Images