Finding OERs
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. The following websites have libraries of open textbooks and other course materials like syllabi and other ancillary material. Some resources even include full courses.
- Directory of Open Access Books- Open access books from academic publishers
- eCampus Ontario- Open textbooks from Ontario colleges and universities.
- Galileo- Open textbooks produced by and used in the University System of Georgia.
- iLumina- Open resources for chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computer science.
- InTech- Open access books in science, technology, and medicine.
- Libre Texts- Open textbooks and other classroom material. Leans heavily towards STEM topics.
- Mason OER Metafinder: searches across 22 OER collections
- Merlot-a repository of peer reviewed, open access resources designed to aid in teaching, learning, and faculty development. It includes OER instruction and pedagogy resources for faculty & students of higher education from around the world and is maintained by the California State University System.
- MIT Open Courseware Online Textbooks- MIT's library of online textbooks is one of the few sources for OER on aeronautics, civil engineering and material science, among many other disciplines.
- MyOpenMath- Free, open source, online course management system for mathematics and other quantitative fields. Students can do practice sessions on their own, or faculty can integrate the textbooks and exercises into a course.
- OASIS- List of open textbooks from OASIS, by SUNY-Geneseo
- OER Commons- A collection of open education resources from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME).
- Open Course Library- A collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments. Materials are licensed under CC BY unless otherwise noted.
- OpenEd CUNY: OERs curated by librarians ; advance search by keyword, subject, material type, format, education level, and license type; also browsable by topic, format, and creator
- Open RN- Project funded by a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Education to create open Nursing Textbooks with open simulations.
- Open Textbook Library+: 850+ open textbooks licensed to be freely used and adapted; download at no cost or print at low cost; browsable by subject
- Open Textbook Store- This site offers a catalog of OER textbooks focusing on math.
- OpenStax+: peer-reviewed college textbooks that are free online and low cost in print; includes instructor resources; browsable by subject
- Project MUSE Open Access: open-access eBooks and journals from university presses, scholarly societies, and independent not-for-profit academic publishers; browsable by subject
- Standard eBooks: formatted classics and literature books from the public domain; browsable by subject
- ZTC Textbooks- Zero-textbook cost textbooks from the College of the Canyons (California) on a wide variety of topics.