This piece is part of a series by participants in the Summer 2025 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Fiona Brady is a third year PhD student in Philosophy at CUNY’s Graduate Center with interests in ethics and moral psychology, esp. as it relates to the Stoics. When not working in philosophy, she is leading historical walking tours in different neighborhoods of New York City, bouldering, or trying out new vegan recipes.

I am teaching a new course this upcoming fall semester, Introduction to Ethics and Moral Judgement. Because the course is new, I did not yet have a syllabus when I began the Summer ‘25 Open Knowledge Fellowship. So, I chose to approach exploring open educational resources (OER) —and open access (OA) resources more generally—much like I would approach exploring a really great, new thrift store—going in with an open mind, seeing what is to be found, and building up from there. I did have a sense of what key topics I wanted the course to cover and how I wanted to structure the course overall. Beyond that though, I was open to what I might find.

In this post, I would like to catalog where I looked, some of what I found, and where I ran into obstacles—such as disciplinary gaps in OA resources that I’ll need to fill with resources from my college’s library. To start at the end though, my main takeaway was that it seems very possible to create an introductory course in my discipline of philosophy which is rich in OER. Some supplementation is likely to be necessary, but I am confident, at this point, that my course will be a ZTC (zero-textbook-cost) course for my students this fall.

Here are some of the main resources I explored during this 3-week Open Knowledge Fellowship:

1. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) & Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
2. Institutional OA repositories like CUNY Academic Works, Oxford University Press (for OA Books), Princeton University Library, Cambridge University Press, Harvard DASH, Rutgers RUcore, UC eScholarship, and Bielefeld University’s BASE. (Other, similar repositories can also be found on sites like JSTOR as well as those for other publishers like Taylor & Francis.)
3. Disciplinary OA repositories like Philosophers’ Imprint, Knowledge Commons Works and SocArxiv.
4. OA repositories for digitalized, primary sources such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Library of Congress Digital Collections, and the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
5. The personal websites of specific scholars in the field whose work I had hoped to include—e.g. Sally Haslanger and Peter Singer.
6. Free online eBook and audiobook libraries like Project Gutenberg.
7. Sites specifically housing OER like OER Commons and Open Textbook Library.
8. The pages of CUNY’s Graduate Center Mina Rees Library on OA and on digitized archives of older, primary sources.
9. Also, where I did want to check a specific publication for OER/OA options, I started with Google Scholar and looked at what links showed up on the right-hand side of the page for each of the top search results. Where an OA link didn’t show up, I turned to a Chrome extension called Unpaywall that looks for OA versions of the publications you search for on any publisher’s site. If a little green tab with an open lock image popped up on the right side of my screen, this meant there was an OA version of the text available. If I got a little grey tab with a closed lock, then I tried another Chrome extension called Open Access Button instead, which can help you to send a request to the authors if it can not find an OA version of the source you are looking for.

Here are some of my takeaways:

1. This approach to syllabus design does take more time. However, the process felt worth the extra time for a number of reasons. For one, by making a sincere effort to create a syllabus that relies primarily on open resources, I am creating something anyone could use. (Also, given I am taking copyright seriously, I am also creating a resource which can be shared not only widely, but openly.) For another, this approach pushed me to think seriously about where good philosophy might be found and how I might connect my students to it in relevant ways. Good written philosophy is not only found behind the paywalls of different scholarly publications. So, one question for me became, where else can it be found? Good philosophy is also not only found in writing. So, another question became, where else is rigorous philosophical inquiry to be found? This last question is of real significance to me insofar as one of my aims for this course is to get students excited about ethics as a subdiscipline, so connecting them to real-world contexts in which serious ethical inquiry is happening seemed essential to achieving this aim in a responsible way.
2. There really is a lot out there in terms of open resources! Here is some of what I found which was helpful to me:
   1. Open versions of older texts (which are either the same or sufficiently similar to those versions I was already familiar with, but which are behind paywalls).
   2. Publications by leading scholars:
      1. Many scholars share their own work in some form or another free online. It is worth checking to see whether a particular scholar has a website with open versions of their publications.
      2. Sometimes you just can’t find a particular publication in an open format. However, when that is the case you can sometimes find related publications by the same author on the same topic. Also, where the open publications are more recent, you get the added benefit of having access to a version of the argument that has evolved in response to objections.
   3. Teaching materials like open textbooks!
      1. For example, I found this Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics textbook and an Applied Ethics Primer.
      2. I also found an introductory anthology of 1000-word essays on topics in philosophy which can be found here: https://1000wordphilosophy.com/.

Finally, where you really are stuck, you can also share a small amount of copyrighted material for teaching purposes in ways which are in accordance with Fair Use—usually one chapter or less than 10% of the work, although it will depend on the publisher. So, if there is a particular piece you really want to share with students, there might be a way to do that too. For more information, you might start with this piece by the New York Times.

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