Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Find open textbooks and resources

Search MSU Libraries for OER

https://mlp.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/oer

Open Textbook Library

http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/

The Open Textbook Library (OTL) is managed by the Open Textbook Network at the University of Minnesota. Books published by many open publishers, such as OpenStax, BC Campus, Open SUNY, and more are aggregated in the OTL. Anyone can suggest a title be added to the library, but the book must meet these criteria.

The OTL currently includes over 600 high quality open textbooks in a wide variety of subject areas.
All textbooks are free to use, adapt, and distribute. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.
Textbooks in the OTL have been peer-reviewed by experts from a variety of colleges and universities to assess quality.
Textbooks can be downloaded for now cost; many can be printed for low cost.
All OTL books are required to be in portable format; in many cases, accessibility is enhanced with the availability of EPUB versions.

OTL's FAQ: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/faq

OER Commons

http://oercommons.org/

Catalog of tens of thousands of OERs to freely use, share, and adapt for the classroom.
Over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER, ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery.
Provides a single point of access to over 500 major content partners.
OERs are evaluated using the Common Core State Standards rubric (CCSS) –www.corestandards.org
Resources can be uploaded to OER Commons or created using their web based "Open Author" tool

MERLOT II

http://merlot.org/

Stands for "Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching"
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development resources and services contributed and used by an international education community
Resources are evaluated on three criteria: Content quality, effectiveness, and ease of use
Offers a powerful search tool for discovering appropriate resources
Includes a wide variety of resource types including web sources, PDF, video, images, and much more

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

https://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=search&uiLanguage=en
DOAB, a service of OAPEN Foundation, enables discovery of open access monographs. Academic publishers are invited to provide the metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata are harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Currently over 13,000 books and chapters are listed in DOAB, which purports to be the "world's largest collection of peer-reviewed books and chapters with an open license."

OpenStax CNX

https://openstax.org/

High-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are free online and low cost to print.
Includes tens of thousands of learning objects called "pages" or modules
"Pages" can be organized and remixed into "books" or collections
Authors can create pages/modules and books/collections, share their work, and adapt other people's work
Users can also discover appropriate OER and save favorite modules in "Lenses"

Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)

https://mason.deepwebaccess.com/mason__MasonLibrariesOpenEducationResources_5f4/desktop/en/search.html

Created by George Mason University Libraries and Deep Web Technologies
Searches seventeen different OER sites concurrently
Searches in real-time for up-to-date results

MIT OpenCourseware

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/
This page is an index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare. Each link below goes to a course or resource page that contains the textbook files. Some of these online textbooks are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books, or course notes which are so thorough that they serve as an alternative to a conventional textbook.

SUNY Open Textbooks

https://textbooks.opensuny.org/

Provides access to peer-reviewed texts
Offers customization options
Contains browsable and searchable lists of books in a variety of academic disciplines

American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative

https://aimath.org/textbooks/
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) encourages the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses, and maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet these criteria.

BC Campus Open Education Resources

https://open.bccampus.ca/
The textbooks are created (or, where possible, re-created from existing open educational resources) by BC post-secondary faculty, reviewed by B.C. faculty and made available under a Creative Commons license. Over 250 titles are available.

PhET Simulations

https://phet.colorado.edu/
Free, interactive math and science simulations created by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where they learn through exploration and discovery.

Project Gutenberg

https://www.gutenberg.org/
Over 58,000 books that can be read online or downloaded--free! Many of these titles are older and have an expired copyright. Explore the "Bookshelves" for a quick way to find related titles. For citation help, see the "Permissions, Trademark and Licensing" link.
Unglue.it
Use this site to search for Project Gutenberg and DOAB titles. Faceted searching capability provided. Create an unglueit account and save favorites for later reading or quick reference.

Lumen Learning

https://lumenlearning.com/

Find over 50 complete courses on the Lumen website where you'll also find customizable faculty resources and supplemental materials such as quiz banks, assignments, discussion forums, slide decks, etc.

For delivery of complete courses in Canvas at a low cost to students, contact Lumen Learning directly.

Additional Open Access Book Publishers

Open Book Publishers
OBP is a non-profit independent publisher that makes high-quality research monographs and textbooks in all subject areas freely available to readers around the world. All OBP books are available to read for free online. There is an option to purchase a print version.
University of California Press Luminos Books
Luminos is University of California Press’ new Open Access publishing program for monographs. All titles undergo two external peer reviews and are vetted and approved by the Faculty Editorial Committee of the University of California Academic Senate.
more...less...
Books are published using a Creative Commons license, with copyright retained by authors. Print versions may be purchased.

HathiTrust Digital Library

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?a=page;page=advanced
A digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform that provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
All users can do the following without logging in:

Search across the entire collection;
Read and view works that are “full-view”;
Search within works that are “limited (search-only)”;
Download a single page at a time from works that have download restrictions (e.g., works that are in the public domain but were digitized by Google or other vendors with contractual limitations);
Download an entire work that doesn’t have download restrictions (e.g., works digitized by Internet Archive and other organizations, works that have been opened with a Creative Commons license);

Library update: Recent database changes

Open Educational Resources