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Dataset Card for OERCommons

OERCommons is an online platform where educators share open-access instructional materials—such as textbooks, lesson plans, problem sets, course syllabi, and worksheets—with the goal of expanding access to affordable education.

OERCommons is an online platform where educators share open-access instructional materials—such as textbooks, lesson plans, problem sets, course syllabi, and worksheets—with the goal of expanding access to affordable education. To collect the openly licensed content available on OERCommons, we construct a search query to retrieve English-language content released into the public domain or under CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses. The resulting documents are converted to plain text directly from the HTML pages hosted on the OERCommons website. Per-document license information is available in the license entry of the metadata field of each example. Code for collecting, processing, and preparing this dataset is available in the common-pile GitHub repo.

Dataset Description

  • Number of samples: 5.24K
  • Number of tokens (Llama 3): 10.82M
  • Average document length in tokens (min, max): 2.06K (48, 293.85K)

Dataset Structure

An entry in the dataset consists of the following fields:

  • id (str): An unique identifier for each document.
  • text(str): The content of the document.
  • source (str): The source of the document.
  • added (str): An date for when the document was added to this collection.
  • created (str): An date range for when the document was originally created.
  • token_count (int): The number of tokens in the sample computed using the Llama 8B tokenizer

Additional Processing

Dataset Statistics

Additional Information

License Information

While we aim to produce datasets with completely accurate licensing information, license laundering and inaccurate metadata can cause us to erroneously assign the incorrect license to some documents (for further discussion of this limitation, please see our paper). If you believe you have found an instance of incorrect licensing in this dataset, please start a discussion on this repository.

Citation Information

If you use this dataset, please cite: 

@article{kandpal2025common,
  title={{The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text}},
  author={Nikhil Kandpal and Brian Lester and Colin Raffel and Sebastian Majstorovic and Stella Biderman and Baber Abbasi and Luca Soldaini and Enrico Shippole and A. Feder Cooper and Aviya Skowron and Shayne Longpre and Lintang Sutawika and Alon Albalak and Zhenlin Xu and Guilherme Penedo and Loubna Ben  and Elie Bakouch and John David  and Honglu Fan and Dashiell Stander and Guangyu Song and Aaron Gokaslan and John Kirchenbauer and Tom Goldstein and Brian R and Bhavya Kailkhura and Tyler Murray},
  journal={arXiv preprint},
  year={2025}
}