Using open-access resources
There are many open-access resources available for education. These give you more flexibility in reusing course content and simplify copyright and permissions issues. To search for open-access resources appropriate for your course, see:
- Unpaywall and Core Discovery are browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome, which add a green tab beside research articles that you can read for free.
- The Open Access Button will search across the web for a freely accessible full-text version of an article and if not found will send an email to the author asking them to provide a copy
- DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
- For a list of Open Access Journals with an Australian publisher view here
- The OAPEN Library is a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books, and the Directory of Open Access Books is a discovery service for OA books.
- OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
Links to copyright free or free for education material are also available through the Copyright free and creative commons guide.
Contact your liaison librarian for more information on Open Access resources appropriate for your subject area.
Using Creative Commons Materials
Creative Commons (CC) licensed material can be a useful source of images, music or text for your research or teaching.
You can find this by searching online under 'Creative Commons' or checking whether there is a link or Creative Commons licence button on the material you want to use.
There are six main licence types :
You cannot use material that is marked as 'non-commercial use' or CC-BY-NC in MOOCs because MOOCs do have a commercial component.
All Creative Commons licences require attribution. Best practice attribution is:
"Name of material" by name of creator is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (or which licence chosen).
If you have any questions about using Creative Commons material please contact the copyright adviser .
Searching for creative commons material
For tips on searching see where to find Creative Commons licensed material and searching for Creative Commons material .
To search Creative Commons own image search (over 9 million images) see Creative Commons search .
You can limit a Google image search to Creative Commons images only by searching for your image, then selecting "Tools" then scroll down to "Usage Rights" and chooe the 'Creative Commons Licences' option.
You can modify Google and other search engines to look for creative commons material only. If you go to advanced search in Google, you can set a filter for reuse. Go to the bottom of the page to 'usage rights' and change it to the type of use you want. 'Free to use or share', 'Free to use or share or modify', 'Free to use or share, even commercially' and 'Free to use or share or modify, even commercially.' 'Free to use or share' would apply to classes at Monash and 'or modify' if you plan on altering the image.