Copyright for Students

(Image: Notman, William McFarlane. (1889). 100 ton mountain engine on the C.P.R., near Field, BC, 1889. Available from Musée McCord Museum, Flickr: The Commons. No known copyright restrictions)

Works that are in the Public Domain can be copied with no need to obtain permission or pay royalties. A work may be part of the Public Domain for one of the following reasons:

• the term of copyright has expired - As of December 30, 2022, the term of copyright in Canada expires 70 years after the death of the work's author
• the work was never eligible for copyright protection

Resources dealing with Public Domain:

• Public Domain Review
  • An online source highlighting Public Domain works
• Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online
  • Compiled by the editors of Public Domain Review-Lists various sources and explains Public Domain and Creative Commons Licenses

"Open access" works "are digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions" (Suber, 2004-2015). The author of an Open Access work retains copyright and determines how their resources can be used. For example, some authors allow derivatives of their work while others do not. To learn more about Open Access, read Open Access Overview by Peter Suber.

A Creative Commons license is a common indicator used with open access works that describes the copyright owner's conditions for use of their work.

You can search for Open Access publications using the following tools:

Textbooks & Books

• Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians
• ecampus Ontario
• BCcampus
• Directory of Open Access Books
• OASIS
• OpenStax – (Rice University)
• Milne Open Textbooks – SUNY (State University of New York)
• Open Textbook Library
• Pressbooks Directory

Journals / Academic Resources

• Arxiv - (Cornell University Library)
• The Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• BASE - Academic Search Engine
• DOAJ - The Directory of Open Access Journals
• OpenDOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories

Images

• Creative Commons Image Search (enter search query and click on the where you want to search, such as "Flickr" or "Pixabay")
• Flickr Creative Commons
• Library and Archives Canada (Creative Commons)
• Pexels (CC0 license)
• Anatomy Image Bank
• Historical Images
  • UBC Library Digitization Centre
  • Library of Congress
  • The British Library
  • The National Archives UK
  • The U.S. National Archives
  • National Library of Ireland on The Commons
  • New York Public Library

Business Case Studies

• MIT Sloan School of Management
• USC Annenberg – (Strategic Communication)
• Open Access Business Case Studies by Ryerson University Library & Archives

Music

• International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) – (Musical scores in the public domain in Canada)
• MusOpen
• J.S. Bach: "Open" Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Recordings of Bach by Kimiko Ishizaka)

Online Teaching and Learning Materials

• Athabasca University
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Open Yale Courses
• Khan Academy - (Close-Captioned videos)
• MERLOT
• Open Educational Resources (OER)
• PhET Interactive Simulations – (Math and Science simulations)
• Open Learning Initiative – (Online courses created by Carnegie Mellon University)

Videos

• Ted Talks
• Vimeo – (Not all videos are closed-captioned)
• YouTube (Use Filter option and select Creative Commons)

Art

• Brooklyn Museum (Creative Commons licence on images in which the Museum owns the copyright)
• J. P. Getty Museum (Come Creative Commons licensed pages and Open Content policy on images in which the Museum owns the copyright)
• Met Museum (Look for images with a OSCA license)
• National Gallery of Art (US) (Images of public domain paintings and sculpture)

Cartoons

• xkcd ("A Webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language")

Odds and Ends

• The Public Domain Review
• Project Gutenberg