Skip to Main Content

Copyright and Fair Use for Biomedical Faculty and Researchers

Alternatives to Using Copyrighted Materials

  • Public Domain
    • Items that are in the public domain are those for which the copyright has expired.
    • Anything created before 1923 is in the public domain.
    • Documents created the U.S. Federal Government are not eligible for copyright protection and are in the public domain (though the documents could contain copyrighted material that was reprinted with the owner's permission)
  • Open Access
    • Open access resources - including journals, images, datasets, etc. - are freely available to anyone to use without a subscription
  • Open Educational Resources
    • These are open access materials specifically for teaching, such as open textbooks.
    • MedEdPortal is a good example of an open educational resource
    • Find OER on sites like https://www.oercommons.org/ or consider making your own. Dartmouth College Library supports this type of work through the Open Education Initiative.
  • Creative Commons licenses
    • Look for works that have been copyrighted under Creative Commons. There are four license types, and most allow reuse with attribution.

If you are interested in finding open materials for your course, please contact the library and we would be happy to help.

Finding Copyright-Free Images Online

Copyright free searching in Google Images:

Enter your search terms. On the results page, toggle to Images and click Tools on the far right.

When the Tools menu opens, select Usage Rights to open a dropdown menu. You’re likely to get the largest number of results if you choose “Labeled for reuse” or “Labeled for noncommercial reuse”.

Any images in your search are now able to be reused, with attribution (citation) to the original source.