Global Resource: Open books
eCampus Ontario Open textbook Library, launched in Spring 2017 and currently contains 180 open texts.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
The Directory of Open Access Books is a collection containing 3,000 academic and peer-reviewed Open Access titles.
The Global Text Project is a joint project of the Terry College of Business of the University of Georgia and The Daniels College of Business of the University of Denver. A collection of open textbooks in the areas of Business, Computing, Education, Health, Science and Social Science.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of free books, movies, music, and more. The material is organized into various thematic or institutional collections.
Open Academics Textbook Catalog
Hosted by the University of Minnesota, this site is a catalog of 150 open textbooks covering Business, Accounting, IT, Economics, Math, Humanities, Law, Math & Statistics, Natural, Physical and Social Sciences.
Open Access Publishing in European Networks is a non-profit foundation dedicated to publishing Open Access academic books. The platform specializes in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Collaborators include Oxford University Press and Routledge.
Open Library is an open library project aiming toward the ambitious goal of “a web page for every book ever published” (Homepage). Over 1,000,000 free books are available, along with another eBook lending library of over 250,000 books.
OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that are peer-reviewed & written by professional content developers.
Florida’s operational repository project of open source educational materials.
Project Gutenberg is a collection of over 49,000 free ebooks, including many classics. All books on Project Gutenberg were previously published by reputable publishers. Books are available in HTML, plain text, or common ebook formats.
The world’s largest publisher of open access science, technology, and medicine books. InTech has made over 3,000 books available for free download.
University of Oxford Text Archive
A collection of literary and linguistic resources for use in higher education, research, teaching, and learning. Resources available in XML, HTML, ePub, mobi, and plain text. Many resources provide links to automatically analyze the texts using Voyant.
An online collection of primarily Classical texts, including Ancient Greek and Roman materials, but also Arabic, Germanic, 19th century American, and Renaissance material.
Content Commons of free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.
Wikibooks is an Open Textbook project containing over 2800 titles. Books are not formally peer-reviewed, and beyond the project’s featured books there is little on-site means of evaluation. Many books are only partially complete.
Other Formats
A repository of learning objects created by British Columbia higher education faculty. Many projects that were funded through the OPDF (Online Program Development Fund) and were created by C2T2 reside in this repository.
Worldwide learning network of shared teaching and learning materials.
Multimedia Educational Resource
The oldest OER collection on the web with objects designed primarily for higher education.
Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
A free and open collection of college-level courses.
Other Toolkits
Laurie Harrison (2018). Open eText Work Flow Diagram
Shannon Moist (2017). Faculty OER Toolkit. BCcampus. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/facultyoertoolkit/
Melissa Falldin, Karen Lauritsen (2017). Authoring Open Textbooks. Open Textbook Network. https://press.rebus.community/authoropen/
Related literature
Affordable Course Content and Open Educational Resources, SPEC Kit 351 (July 2016) http://publications.arl.org/Affordable-Course-Content-Open-Educational-Resources-SPEC-Kit-351/
Chmura, Michael, Faculty Survey Finds Awareness of Open Educational Resources Low but Improving (Babson College) http://www.babson.edu/news-events/babson-news/Pages/faculty-survey-open-education-resources-low-but-improving.aspx
Guide to Developing Open Textbooks, Moore, Andrew, and Butcher, Neil http://oasis.col.org/handle/11599/2390
Educators’ open educational collaboration online: The dilemma of emotional ownership, Henri Pirkkalainen, Jan M. Pawlowski and Dimitra Pappa http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.005
Faculty Members’ Instructional Priorities for Adopting OER, Insung Jung, Seongyoun Hong, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2803
Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries, Research Library Issues, No. 280 (September 2012).
http://publications.arl.org/rli280/2
Rolfe, V. (2012). Open educational resources: staff attitudes and awareness. Research In Learning Technology, 20. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.14395
Opening the textbook: Open Education Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16 (Babson Survey Research Group, Open Educational resources: 2016 National Report) http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html
Leading campus OER initiatives through library–faculty collaboration, Mandi Goodsett, Barbara Loomis, and Marsha Miles, College & Undergraduate Libraries Vol. 23 , Iss. 3,2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2016.1206328
Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2014, I. Elaine Allen and Jef Seaman http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthecurriculum2014.pdf
Infographic: http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthecurriculum2014infographic.pdf
Delimont, N., Turtle, E., Bennett, A., Adhikari, K., & Lindshield, B. (2016). University students and faculty have positive perceptions of open/ alternative resources and their utilization in a textbook replacement initiative. Research In Learning Technology, 24. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.29920
Jhangiani, R. S., Pitt, R., Hendricks, C., Key, J., & Lalonde, C. (2016). Exploring faculty use of open educational resources at British Columbia post-secondary institutions. BCcampus Research Report. Victoria, BC: BCcampus. https://bccampus.ca/files/2016/01/BCFacultyUseOfOER_final.docx
Collister, Lauren Brittany and Barnett, John H. and Calloway, Lauren (2014) Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talk #13: Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks. In: Scholarly Communication and Publishing Lunch and Learn Talks, 22 July 2014, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. (Unpublished)
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/22447/
UNESCO, Support for the establishment of a UNESCO normative instrument for open educational resources (OER) Provisional agenda of the 99th session of the UNESCO executive board meeting (2016) Available: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002442/244241e.pdf [13 May 2016]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. We encourage re-use of these materials!