Open icon library

What it is for

A good figure needs clean scientific icons, a cell, a mouse, a flask, a species silhouette, and finding ones you are actually allowed to publish is harder than it should be. The open icon library answers that. It lives at /library, it needs no account, and it gathers openly licensed scientific art into one searchable place so you can find an icon and use it without worrying about whether you may.

It is a free alternative to BioRender for the asset side of figure making. The whole collection is openly licensed and free to use, and because every asset carries its provenance, the attribution that open licenses ask for is produced for you rather than left as your homework.

What is in it

The library holds roughly 30,000 assets drawn from openly licensed sources, chiefly PhyloPic for organism silhouettes and BioIcons for scientific diagram icons. Everything is vector art that scales cleanly into a figure at any size.

Only genuinely open licenses are included, CC0, Public Domain, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA. Assets under a non-commercial (NC) or no-derivatives (ND) license are deliberately left out, so anything you find here is safe to use and to adapt in published work.

Browse, search, and the category tree

You can explore the library two ways. Search by keyword to jump straight to what you need, or walk a category tree that organizes the collection by subject so you can browse by area when you are not sure what to call the thing you want. Each asset shows its name, its source, and its license at a glance.

Attribution is handled for you

Open licenses still ask for credit, and getting that credit right is fiddly. The library does it for you. Every asset records the source it came from and a verbatim citation, so when you use an icon you have the exact attribution text ready to paste, with no guessing about who to credit or how.

Using icons in your figures

The library feeds the Figure Composer, where you lay your panels out on a publication page. Pull an icon from the library into a composition and it sits alongside your live data panels, exported together as one clean vector figure, with the attribution it needs traveling with it.

Contributing and review

The library is meant to grow, and it grows in the open. A community contribution flow lives at /library/contribute, where you can submit an openly licensed asset, and an independent peer-review flow at /library/review, where submissions are vetted before they join the collection. The review step is what keeps the license guarantees above true as the library expands.