Research Guides: Open Education Resources (OERs): Find Open Textbooks

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What are Open Texbooks

Open textbooks are part of a larger movement called "Open Educational Resources" (OER)
An open textbook is a textbook with an open copyright license that allows the material to be freely accessed, shared and adapted.
Open licenses allow instructors to adapt, remix, or customize existing open textbooks to maximize instructional content to meet their own learning objectives
Many open textbooks are developed through traditional peer review, others are vetted by experts. As with any textbook, the instructor is the final judge of whether an open textbook meets the needs of the course.
They are free for anyone to view and download in an online format and can be made available in a print format at a nominal cost.

NOTE: Open Access vs. Open Education Resource

You can find many open resources on the mega sites listed below. Please note that varying degrees of "open" exist between, and even within these sites. Remember to assess each individual resource for its appropriateness, accessibility, and level of openness.

Find Existing Resources

Contact the Open Education Librarian, Brenda Smith, for help on finding what OER resources are currently available in your field.

Find Open Textbooks

The links below are open resources mega sites that offer books as well as other OER teaching tools.

Assayer
Largest catalogue of open sources textbooks. Also is a good place to find free books about math, science and computers.
AU Press
Athabasca University Press - free pdf and low cost print version of mainly Canadian books.
BC Open Collection
Search the BCcampus open collection
eCampus Ontario Open Library
Collection of open textbooks and other open resources
HathiTrust Digital Library
A partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
LibreTexts
Non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. Students, faculty, and outside experts work together to build OER. Currently covers 12 widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages.
MERLOT - Education resources
The MERLOT system provides access to curated free and open online teaching and learning support materials and content creation tools, used by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
Milne Open Textbooks
Formerly known as "Open SUNY Textbooks." Contains the open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY (State University of New York) faculty and staff.
OAPEN
Contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the humanities and social sciences.
OER Commons
Worldwide learning network of shared teaching and learning materials.
Open Courseware Consortium
Collaboration of higher education institutions to share and expand their open course offerings.
OpenStax
Peer reviewed post secondary textbooks
Open Textbook Library
One of the largest repositories of open textbooks.
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Textbooks are available to use, keep, revise, and share under open licenses.
Textbook Revolution
"Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. On this site you'll find links and reviews of textbooks and select educational resources."
Wikibooks
Wikimedia's community for creating and sharing educational textbooks.

Attribution

"Open Education Resources (OERs)" by TRU Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Based on a work at http://open.bccampus.ca/bcoer-librarians/bcoer-guides/.