Scholarly Communications: Public Domain

The Creative Commons Open Education Platform is a space for open education advocates and practitioners to identify, plan and coordinate multi-national open education content, practices and policy activities.

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 22% of which comes from sponsors and 78% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.

DOAJ operates an education and outreach program across the globe, focussing on improving the quality of applications submitted.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture. Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school's wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions. The Center's Faculty Co-Directors are James Boyle, David Lange, Arti Rai and Jerome Reichman. Its Director is Jennifer Jenkins. The Center is supported in its operation by a generous founding gift and by grants from foundations.

"Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitized items – books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for." Must search for open access materials by researching copyright restrictions through site.

"The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge"

Some in Public Domain but not all.

Download thousands of historic media files for your creative projects.
Completely free & made available by Pond5.

a collection of 59,658,846 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. (3/6/2020)

Compound Interest is a site that aims to take a closer look at the chemical compounds we come across on a day-to-day basis, explaining them with easy-to-understand graphics.

Welcome to the Yellowstone sound library, where you can immerse yourself in the aural landscape of America's first national park. The files available here were recorded in the park and are in the public domain. They may be downloaded and used without limitation; however, please credit the "National Park Service " where appropriate.

Bensound.com has been created by Benjamin TISSOT also know as Bensound, a Composer and Musician based in France who has been creating music for more than 10 years.

Free Music Archive (FMA), founded in 2009 by radio station WFMU, offers free access to open licensed, original music. Many curators, netlabels and independent musicians around the world contributed to FMA's success. Tens of millions of visitors every month download, share and/or re-use music from FMA in videos, podcasts, films, games, apps and even school projects. More on FMA's philosophy and mission, see our About page. Free Music Archive is part of the Tribe of Noise family since September 2019.

​Browse our most popular collections of royalty-free stock photos. We're constantly adding new copyright-free pictures to seasonal and trending categories. All our images are high-resolution and free for personal and commercial use.

The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives.

A source for high-resolution stock images issued under creative commons licenses.

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.

Pixabay- is an international, copyleft and free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and film footage. All video and image files available on the platform can be used without attribution requirement and also for commercial aim.

Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo."

General Science, Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Weather & Environment, Chemistry, Astronomy, Transportation and Automotive

"Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains over a million digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts."

"collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films"

Browse the Creative Commons licensed videos on Vimeo. Learn about what you can and can't do with other people’s videos on Vimeo to help you share, rework and reuse legally.

Movies in the Public Domain