Research Guide: Open Educational Resources (OERs)

• Cambridge dictionary
• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Infoplease dictionary
• Infoplease Columbia Encyclopedia

• Directory of Open Access Books
• SpringerLink Open Access Books
• Internet archive - a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

• Directory of open access journals
• Academic journals
• ScienceDirect open access journals and books
• Taylor and Francis Open journals
• JSTOR and Artstor - Open and free content
• African journals online
• Scientific Electronic Library Online (SCIELO) 

• CORE  
• ScienceOpen - Functioning as a research and publishing network
• Paperity
• Unpaywall

• Registry of Research Data Repositories
• Google Dataset Search for Open Science
• UNdata
• UNESCO data: Data for the Sustainable Development Goals
• World Bank data
• Dryad

• NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations)  is an international organization dedicated to the preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). 
• Open access theses and dissertations
• EBSCO Open Dissertations
• EThOS - the E-Theses Online Service are doctoral theses awarded by higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are any type of educational material that are freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

This page will focus on OER's for research related topics only.

• FAQ:  Answering a few general questions on OER's
• OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources
• OpenAlex is a comprehensive open catalog of the global research system - scholarly papers, authors, institutions, and more.

General courses

Note: This section includes a lot of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). If you want to enroll in a free version of a MOOC, please select the “Full Course, No Certificate” (edX) or “Audit” (Coursera) option. If you opt to take the course for a certificate/credential, you will be charged.

• Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.
• edX is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is governed by MIT and Harvard.
• MIT OpenCourseWare (OWC) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content.
• OER research in Africa
• Academic Earth: Academic Earth believes that everyone has the right to a world-class education.         

Writing courses

• A Beginner’s Guide to Writing in English for University Study – University of Reading
• Introduction to University writing by BC campus
• Advanced Writing – UC Irvine
• Grammar and Punctuation – UC Irvine
• Grammar and Punctuation Advanced – UC Irvine
• Writing for Strategic Communication – Karen Morath, La Trobe University

• UNESCO digital library
• World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
• CIA World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, ggeography, communication, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 entities.
• OECD Stat includes data and metadata for OECD countries and selected non-member economies.
• Statistics South Africa is the national statistical service of South Africa, with the goal of producing timely, accurate, and official statistics in order to advance economic growth, development, and democracy
• National Research Foundation (NRF)
• ASSAF (ACADAMY OF SCIENCE OF SOUTH AFRICA)
• NISC (‘National Inquiry Services Centre)

• Grammarly - Free writing assistance with spelling, grammar and plagiarism detection

• Mendeley Reference Management assist you can easily organize and search your personal library, annotate documents and cite as you write.
• Zotero is an easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite and share your research.

• Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner
• Kepler Is a free and open source scientific workflow system that enables researchers to create, execute, and share models and analyses.
• Mendeley Data is a secure cloud-based repository where you can store your data, ensuring it is easy to share, access and cite, wherever you are. 
• OpenRefine is used for cleaning, transforming and matching data. 

• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• Picjumbo
• GIMP is a free image editor. The software provides the tools needed for high quality image manipulation.
• Windows Movie Maker