Open Educational Resources

What are OER Textbooks? Textbooks that are educational resources, typically free to access online, customizable, and licensed by the author/creator with rights that are less restrictive than copyright.

• Affordable Learning Georgia - affordable alternative to expensive commercial textbooks
• Bay College OER
• BC Open Campus - British Columbia Open Campus offers 130 open textbooks in a searchable database.  
• Bookboon - Online Textbooks for free.
• California Open Online Library for Education (COOL4ED)
• CK-12
• College Open Textbooks - List of open textbooks by subject for 2yr colleges, from the College Open Textbooks Collaborative.
• Michigan Open Textbook Project (3-12)
• OpenStax - Rice University; offers peer-reviewed OER textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most college courses.
• Open SUNY - open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries.
• Open Textbook Library - reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. 
• panOpen Public OER Library - a platform that enables mainstream institutional adoption of Open Educational Resources as an alternative to commercial textbooks
• Saylor Academy - courses built from curated OERs and are openly-licensed for reuse to adopt and adapt
• Siyavula (4-12)
• Textbook Revolution

What is an Open Book? A random free book and not necessarily a textbook.

• Affordable Learning Solutions: Open Educational Resources by College - Lots of sources of OERs, grouped by discipline, from San Jose State University.
• The Assayer
• Bartleby
• Bookserver
• Dickinson College Commentaries - a platform for peer-reviewed and edited commentaries on Latin and ancient Greek texts.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) - peer-reviewed books
• Feedbooks
• Kirkwood Community College - Open Textbooks, OER & Other Open or Free Resources for Faculty
• LibreTexts
• LibriVox
• Online Books Page
• Online Library of Liberty
• Open Book Publishers
• Open Library
• Perseus Digital Library
• Project Gutenberg - the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks and offers over 59,000 free eBooks
• Read Print
• University of Minnesota Center for Open Education - searchable database of textbooks by discipline.
• The University of Oxford Text Archive
• Wikibooks

Except for the PPT, this guide is adapted from the work of Lauren B. Collister at the University of PIttsburgh, Portland Community College, Virginia Tech, and UMass Amherst Libraries.

This content in this guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.