Open Educational Resources

The Encyclopedia of Life is an online collaborative encyclopedia providing global access to knowledge about biological life on earth. Entries are composed as written content with one or more pictures usually in the form of colour photographs. Content is provided by a wide variety of contributors but is reviewed for accuracy. All content on EOL is licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, but each contributor defines what level of CC licensing is applicable to their content. Specific licensing information can be found adjacent to media or by clicking on desired media. If no reuse information is included then it is understood that there are no reuse restrictions other than providing credit when reusing the image.

Europeana provides access to the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections including paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects. Not all the works are openly licensed so be sure to check for usage rights.

To find images openly licensed click “advanced options” in the top, right-hand side screen. Change the “any license” to an open license – reuse, commercial and modification options available.

At the search screen, select "free to use or share" or "free to use or modify" to find CC licensed images.

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.”

The Noun Project is a platform empowering the community to build a global visual language of icons and symbols that everyone can understand. Symbols and icons on The Noun Project are licensed using Creative Commons.

The sources above are online image databases. In addition to these sources there are many openly licensed electronic publications and journals with images embedded throughout that you are also free to use. Here are just a few of many examples:

Note, that Open Clip Art Library images are public domain images you can freely use for personal and commercial use without attribution to the original author.

PLOS is a non-profit publisher and advocacy organization focused on science and medicine. Every article they publish is open access. All written content and images are licensed using a Creative Commons Attribution license. Searching through PLOS journals and collections can yield many highly useful images including figures, tables, and graphs.

In addition to electronic publications and journals some galleries, museums and archives publish historical images online.

Over 550,000 free (do-whatever-you-want) high-resolution photos brought to you by the world’s most generous community of photographers.