Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Textbooks &amp; OER Search Engines

Open Access Textbooks

An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open copyright license and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers, and members of the public. They are available for free as online versions, and as low-cost printed versions, should students or faculty opt for these. Open textbooks are a way to significantly reduce student textbook costs while giving instructors the flexibility to reformat and customize their course material. They are an affordable, flexible alternative to traditionally-published textbooks.

Faculty may learn more about evaluating open access textbooks from these resources:

Open Educational Resources at the University of Kansas
In 2015 KU joined the Open Textbook Network, an alliance of higher education institutions committed to improving access, affordability, and academic success through the use of open textbooks. OER is an approach to overcoming cost and reuse barriers to the benefit of students and instructors.
Open Educational Resources at the University of Missouri
This guide covers ways to find, create, and use Open Textbooks & Open Educational Resources
Link to the Benedictine Library's Guide to Open Educational Resources
This guide is under construction, but available for browsing.

Search for OER Materials

Open Illinois: OER Commons
This centralized repository provides materials helpful to academic and research institutions in developing OER and advocating for adoption of OER on their campuses to reduce students' costs.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.” Currently has over 700 textbooks.
OASIS
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) "is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records." Developed by SUNY Geneseo Milne Library.
OER Commons
Searchable collection of OERs in a variety of subject areas, includes textbooks. It is a project created by ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). From their website "ISKME is an independent, education nonprofit whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector." Established in 2002 and based in Silicon Valley.
OpenStax
Open textbooks in a variety of subjects that can be accessed electronically for free. Texts also has an option to purchase a print copy. There are an increasing number of ancillary materials for each text.
Additional Resources

Checklist

OER Finding & Adopting Checklist for Instructors

Free Downloads

Bibliomania
Provides access to poems, short stories, fiction and non-fiction texts.

Google Books
Use the Advanced Search to limit results to "Full View Only."

Online Books Page
Index of free books available online.

Open Culture
Collection of free e-books, audiobooks, textbooks, films, and language lessons.

Oxford Text Archive
Provides access to electronic resources for use in higher education.

Project Gutenberg
Provides access to public domain texts in downloadable form.

Wikibooks
Open access textbook collection editable by anyone, much like Wikipedia.