Below are five of the best tools currently available for finding Open Access and Open Educational Resources.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)
BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder searches seventeen targets in real-time, instantly returning the top several hundred or so most relevant hits from each site. Because it is a real-time search, it can take a bit longer than searchers of pre-indexed, curated content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target.
Openverse
Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Openverse searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.
OER Commons Search
From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER.
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. OASIS currently searches open content from 61 different sources and contains 160,727 records.”
For a quick review of what constitutes an Open resource and how to make use of them please review the following brief guides.
For further assistance regarding Open Access or Open Educational Resources please contact David Smith.