Open Access Collections

DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.

To search for Creative Commons licensed content use these pre-made searches, and add your search to the box:
Public Domain
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)
Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)
Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)
Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)
Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)
Attribution (by)

This page features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. Each set of content is based on a theme and is first featured on the Library's home page.

These sets are just a small sample of the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The digital collections comprise millions of items including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, films, sound recordings and more. Whenever possible, each collection has its own rights statement which should be consulted for guidance on use. Learn more about copyright and the Library's collections.

Did you know that more than 180,000 of the items in our Digital Collections are in the public domain?
That means everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways. The Library now makes it possible to download such items in the highest resolution available directly from the Digital Collections website.

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It's all free. It's all enriching. But it's also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it.

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 more than 4.5 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

The Conversation US launched as a pilot project in October 2014. It is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public.

Access to independent, high quality, authenticated, explanatory journalism underpins a functioning democracy. Our aim is to promote better understanding of current affairs and complex issues. And hopefully allow for a better quality of public discourse and conversation.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.

We believe that working with publishers to make Open Access monographs discoverable alongside other types of content on a highly used platform will increase their usage and impact. The Open Access titles are cross-searchable with journals and primary sources on JSTOR.
Accessibility: Accessibility Statement

Free public domain audiobooks.

Luminos is University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
Accessibility: Policy.

Books and journals.

NYU Press is pleased to offer these books in an open access platform for reading on desktop and mobile devices. We will continue to contribute new titles each year.

If you are interested in purchasing the print edition of any of these books, we encourage you to order it at your local independent bookstore, or click on the “buy this book” link in each title’s detail page.

The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
Accessibility: Most files are PDF full-text indexed and without document security, which should work with most screen readers. Some are XML files, which are viewed as HTML.

The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone. Libraries investing in the Open Research Library contribute to the development of a dedicated infrastructure for the global research community, while participating libraries have the opportunity to benefit from a set of exclusive services.

The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain eBooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced eBooks. The text and cover art in our eBooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole eBooks files themselves into the public domain.

unglue (v. t.) 6. To reward authors and publishers for sharing books with the world.

This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.