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Astronomy: Open Access/OER

Open Access Databases for Astronomy

  • arXiv.org | Cornell University
    "Open access to 853,987 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics"
  • Astrophysics and Astronomy Commons
    Over 5,000 scholarly articles available.
  • Astrophysics Data System
    The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 10.7 million records.
  • Ciencia.Science.gov
    Spanish version of Science.gov
  • Crystallography Open Database
    "Open-access collection of crystal structures of organic, inorganic, metal-organic compounds and minerals, excluding biopolymers."
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
    "The Map Database has many viewers and the Blog has numerous categories. The physical map collection is housed in the David Rumsey Map Center at the Stanford University Library. The historical map collection has over 75,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World."
  • figshare
    Discover research archived by institutions and by individuals.
  • MERLOT
    "MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community."
  • NASA Technical Reports Server
    "Over 500,000 aerospace-related citations, over 200,000 full-text online documents, and over 500,000 images and videos are available in the three collections that are integrated in NTRS"
  • National Science Digital Library
    "The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines
  • SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
    "The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a Digital Library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic databases containing more than 10.2 million records."
  • SciELO.org (Scientific Electronic Library Online)
    International collection of over 1,000 open access eJournals.
  • Science.gov
    Provides links to a wide variety of scientific resource materials, indexes, and statistics produced by U. S. departments, agencies, and related institutes and labs.
  • ScienceCinema
    Highlights leading-edge research from the U.S. Department of Energy as well as the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Using innovative, state-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology from Microsoft Research, ScienceCinema allows users to search for specific words and phrases spoken within video files. Simply enter a term in the box and start exploring!
  • US Fire Statistics
    The U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) collects data from a variety of sources to provide information and analyses on the status and scope of the fire problem in the United States.
  • Yale Digital Content
    "Search nearly two million items and half a million images from across Yale's collections." Find Yale online courses, and museum items. Some content subject to copyright -- be sure to check.

OER Repositories, Aggregators, and Catalogs

Quick Search for OER

Type your search, then click the source you wish to search.

Hint: Enclose phrases in quotation marks, as in "critical thinking".



Need more information?

OpenStax/Connexions is a place to find, adopt, and adapt textbooks and associated materials and to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.

Open Oregon Searches courses and describes and links to the resources used. Oregon community college instructors use these resources to reduce textbook costs in their courses. If you see a name and email address, feel free to contact that person about their class.

Skills Commons from the US Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program is a free and open online library free and open learning materials and program support materials for job-driven workforce development. This site is great for program, course, and curriculum development.

The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren't searching a static database that we've built.  Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy.

The Open Education Consortium is a free and open digital publication of high quality university-level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content. They come from universities all over the world, such as MIT, Harvard, Yale, Tufts, Open University Netherlands.

"AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use. AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout."

ATE Central "With an emphasis on two-year colleges, the National Science Foundation's ATE (Advanced Technological Education) program focuses on the education of technicians for the high-technology fields that drive our nation's economy."

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