This is a collection of openly licensed or free textbooks and materials that can be used to enhance teaching and learning. This page highlights some of the Open Educational Resources (OER) available, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you would like to learn more about OER please visit the Open Educational Resources and Textbook Affordability Library Guide.
"Initiative in British Columbia that intends to provide open textbooks for the largest courses in the province. The BCcampus library includes textbooks developed by Canadian authors as well as other texts that have been borrowed for use by instructors in British Columbia. The library is strong in general education courses but also includes options for a number of skills and trades. Faculty reviews and ancillary resources are available for some textbooks - look for links that help you locate these in the library.
"Access digitized art history publications, rare books, and related literature"
"Search portal for Open Access Books."
"HathiTrust (listen to pronunciation) is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 120 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide."
"The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books. Try the archive's site OpenLibrary for an interface to the published books on archive.org and links to other online book collections."
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
"The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative, independently-researched information on important matters in science and health policy."
"The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation."
"Open Bookshelf contains an exciting, diverse collection of titles spanning a myriad of genres. Readers will find: the classics they know and love, from Austen to Twain, updated for EPUB 3.0 format with beautiful covers; the best Creative-Commons licensed works from innovative authors like Cory Doctorow; freely available textbooks and academic titles representing the push for open scholarship; and an exciting multicultural children’s collection."
"OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education."
"Open SUNY Textbooks is an open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants and SUNY Geneseo."
"Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization."
"Offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education."
Purdue university press is making their older publication available, specifically 1973-2006.
"Open Educational Resources from Leading Colleges and Universities."
"The University of Pittsburgh Press and the University Library System (ULS) have formed a partnership to make books published by the Press available online. By digitizing these volumes and distributing them freely on the Internet, the University of Pittsburgh Press is enabling greater access to the material previously available only as print editions."
Open source textbooks that are written by professional content developers who are experts in their fields and undergo a rigorous peer review process. All textbooks meet standard scope and sequence requirements.
The Open Textbook Library provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. The MERLOT Collection is made up of over 40,000 materials in 19 different material type categories.
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
BCcampus was asked to create a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training. Our open textbooks are openly licensed using a Creative Commons license, and are offered in various e-book formats free of charge, or print on demand books available at cost.
OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER everyone can more efficiently find what they need.
Open textbooks, syllabi, and supporting materials created under Affordable Learning Georgia OER grants. Materials are licensed under various Creative Commons licenses.
"DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available."
"The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work."
"The mission of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ISSN 2166-6245) is to promote open scholarly discourse around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching, learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments"
"An Open Access Journal of learning, teaching, and technology."
