All resources used in P2PU courses must be freely available. It's makes us even happier if they are openly licensed.  

Although most of us use Google to wade through the web and find free resources, we are still left with the task of finding out if these resources are open or not. Luckily for us, there are search engines and collections specifically for open resources. Here are our recommendations for gathering OER. 

WHAT IS OPEN?

The Open Knowledge Project states that “a piece of knowledge is open if you are free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.” Openness is one of P2PU's core values. "Open sharing and collaboration enable participation, innovation, and accountability. Our community is open so that everyone can participate. Our content is open so that everyone can use it. Our model and technology are open to enable experimentation and ongoing improvement. And our processes are open so that we are accountable to our community."

FINDING OPEN RESOURCES

Open Search Engine

http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/

The Creative Commons DiscoverEd Search Engine retrieves all types of educational materials on the web with an open license. This allows you to find educational materials that are open by default. You can also use Google.com to track down resources, but they may not necessarily be open.

Open Access Journals & Self-Archived Papers

http://www.doaj.org/

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a good way to find journals. To find an article about a specific topic, search Google Scholar, and see if you get a link to an open version. (Careful, if you are using a university connection, you might access toll-material without noticing. Try opening the resource on a non-university connection to make sure everyone can access it, or ask us).

Directory of Open Access Repositories

This lists institutional and subject repositories around the world. These do two things. First, they often hold masters and PhD theses, these can be very useful (although often a bit long and unwieldy). Second, they hold articles written by academics. Often, these are articles that have been published in traditional closed journals, and which the author has self-archived here (see below). Sometimes, it's working papers or reports that have not been published traditionally.

SHERPA/RoMEO

About 70% of the journals in the world now allow authors to "self-archive", this means to take usually their final draft (not the PDF generated by the journal), and upload this to a personal homepage, or to a repository. However, many academics don't know about this, or are too busy to do it. Using the link above, you can find out about the copyright policies of most journals (and they are happy to add new ones). If you find an article you really want to use, but which is not open access, check the journal's copyright policy here. If it says that it allows self-archiving, you should contact the original author and encourage them to self-archive their paper, so you can use it. Authors are usually quite amenable to this, because unlike with a book, they make no money from people buying that journal, and in general, they are very happy to see their work used by more people. If you have any questions about this, or feel uneasy about writing to a professor, Stian can help.

Open Summaries of Closed Academic Papers & Reports

http://acawiki.org/

AcaWiki is like a "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to increase the impact of scholars, students, and bloggers by enabling them to share summaries and discuss academic papers online. AcaWiki turns research hidden in academic journals into something more dynamic and accessible. If you have access to a closed article and want to share it with your course members - summarize it for Acawiki!

Open Textbooks

• FlatWorldKnowledge produces freely licensed books that can also be printed on demand.
• Open Tech eBooks lists a variety of open textbooks ranging from how to program in Python to Unix programming. 
• The Open Educational Resources (OER) Consortium is one of the best places to locate over 450 college-level open textbooks in many subject areas:

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