Research Guides: Affordable Course Materials: Find Open Textbooks (OER)

What's On This Page?

This page provides:

A list of sites where you can search for OER textbooks
A brief introduction to Open Educational Resources and the licensing involved that makes them free to use
A list of sites where you can search for images and media licensed for free use and sharing
OpenStax video: "The Impact of a Free Book"
A further list of open resources and repositories
MERLOT Open search tool

Find Open Textbooks (OER)

California Open Online Library for Education (COOL4ED)
A project created and overseen by members of the three higher education systems in California (CCC, CSU, UC), "Cool 4 ED" provides access to free and open textbooks for use in lower division courses. While still in production, when completed, COOL4Ed will contain peer-reviewed books textbooks for 50 courses!
OER Commons
Search for a wide swathe of OER resources by topic, format, and education level. You can create a free account and save items to folders.
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. Developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
Open Textbook Library
A curated collection of over 170 high quality open textbooks, many of which are peer-reviewed.
Openstax College
A growing collection of peer-reviewed textbooks in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Openstax is a nonprofit initiative of Rice University.
LibreTexts
A popular non-commercial platform for students, faculty, and outside experts to work together to build freely available open education resources (OER). Initiated at the University of California, Davis.
Milne Open Textbooks (SUNY)
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Grand Valley State University
A small but growing collection of open educational resources authored by faculty at GVSU and hosted by the university's open-access repository, ScholarWorks@GVSU.
British Columbia Open Textbook Project
A Canadian collection of higher education textbooks in the fields of Arts, Business, Health, Science, Social Sciences
Writing Spaces Open Textbook Chapters
A book series comprising peer-reviewed collections of essays on issues specific to writing.
Wikibooks
Hosted by the Wikimedia foundation, Wikibooks is an open content textbook collection spanning a variety of reading levels, disciplines, and languages.
Open Book Publishers
UK publishing imprint that provides free online access and low cost formatted and print access to titles with a special emphasis on humanities, digital humanities, and social sciences.
Open Textbooks for Engineering
A listing of open textbooks, maintained by the Engineering Library Division of the American Society for Engineering Education.

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either (a) in the public domain or (b) licensed in a manner that provides everyone with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities.

Retain – make, own, and control a copy of the resource
Reuse – use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly
Revise – edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource
Remix – combine your original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new
Redistribute – share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others

(From Creative Commons)

This LibGuide seeks to provide instructors, students, and staff access to a variety of OAR/OER resources and search tools in order to assist our campus community in mitigating high course materials costs to increase equity and access in higher education.

JISC-Open Educational Resources
An explanatory guide on Open Educational Resources including myths, evaluation, and learning and teaching considerations.
OER Tutorial-Algonquin College
A detailed tutorial covering OER, copyright, and Creative Commons licensing from Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada.
An Open Education Reader
A collection of essays on open education compiled by David Wiley. Dr. Wiley, an expert in the field of open education, is the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning and adjunct faculty at BYU.
Open Education Handbook
This Wikibook on Open Education continues to evolve as the community contributes to it. The resource provides information on terminology, software, case studies, and key issues in open education.
Writing an Open Textbook: Is it Worth It?
Tony Bates, an expert in open and distance education chronicles his experience in creating an open textbook and determines that it was well worth the effort.

Open Images and Media

Calisphere
Calisphere provides free access to California collections of photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, and musical recordings, digitized and contributed by California universities, libraries, and museums. The content is publicly available for research, teaching, and private study.
WorldImages Kiosk
WorldImages Kiosk is a searchable image database created by faculty, staff and students in the CSU system. It contains images from a wide variety of fields, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. Images are licensed for non-profit educational use with attribution (CC BY-NC 2.5).

Flickr: Creative Commons
Search here to find Flickr photos that have been licensed under a Creative Commons license. Click on the image license link to learn more about the restrictions for an individual image.
Google Image Search (Open License)
From this Google Advanced Search page, select the appropriate search parameter from the "usage rights" drop down menu.
Getty Open Content Program
"The Getty makes available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required."
Wellcome Library images
A major resource for medical, biomedical, and social history images, both historical and contemporary, Wellcome Images contains over 170 000 images, all available for use under a CC license.
Open content-Metropolitan Museum of Art
Please see the link to learn how to determine which of the digital images in the MET's collection are open access.
Ubuweb
A vast resource for avant-garde poetry, art, film, video, and audio
New York Public Library Open Digital Collections
"NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more."
Europeana
30+ million digital objects from Europe's cultural institutions. Search results can be limited to those with non-restrictive licenses for reuse.
Freer | Sackler Asian art images
The Smithsonian Freer and Sackler galleries have digitized more than 40,000 images from their collections of Asian art, most of which are available in high-resolution and free of copyright restrictions for noncommercial use.
New Old Stock
A source for Creative Commons licensed vintage stock photographs.
Unsplash
A source for openly licensed stock photographs.
LibreStock
A search engine for Creative Commons photos

The Impact of a Free Book

Open resources and repositories

Internet Archive
Open access to a multitude of digital objects and collections in a wide array of formats including books, videos, audio recordings, and web pages.
Open Library
Open Library, an initiative of the Internet Archive, is "an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published." The resource is entirely open--from software to data to documentation. Individuals are encouraged to contribute!
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 46,000 free ebooks in epub and kindle formats for download or to read them online. There are many classic novels in the collection.
Open Humanities Press
An international, scholar-led open access publishing collective with a focus on humanities disciplines.
Digital Public Library of America
8,007,019 items from libraries, archives, and museums, as well as numerous apps to enrich the discoverability and use of the collections.
MERLOT II
Administered by the CSU, MERLOT houses tens of thousands of learning objects and tools for building your own resources. The collection includes books, quizzes, exercises, labs, assessments, and more.
OpenStax
OpenStax textbooks.
Khan Academy
View video modules in a wide array of disciplines. It is necessary to create a free account to use Khan Academy.
MIT OpenCourseWare
"MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity."
Carnegie Mellon University-Open Learning Initiative
"The Open Learning Initiative (OLI) is a grant-funded group at Carnegie Mellon University, offering innovative online courses to anyone who wants to learn or teach. Our aim is to create high-quality courses and contribute original research to improve learning and transform higher education."
Ubiquity Press
Open access publisher of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. Ubiquity's publications include titles in disciplines less well represented in open access publishing, such as archeology and anthropology.
Open Library of Humanities
"The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). We are funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined us in our mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future."
OAPEN
Both a collection of open access publications and a publishing platform with a focus on social sciences and humanities.
Wikimedia Commons
a collection of 80,796,630+ freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute