Open Educational Resources
Open Textbook Collections
- Directory of Open Access Books From the site: “The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books…. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.”
- Global Text Project From the site: “We publish open content electronic textbooks that are freely available from this website. We focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.”
- Google Books From the site: “Search the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books.”
- Hathi Trust “Over 8.7 million scanned items, all described by precise metadata, are currently in the HathiTrust database. About 75% of the items in the HathiTrust catalog are copyrighted; the remainder are in the public domain and may be freely used. The copyrighted items are generally inaccessible, even to institutions associated with the project. About half of the catalog’s items are in English, although 400 languages are represented.” – Description from University at Buffalo
- Lumen Learning From the site: “Co-founded by open-education visionary Dr. David Wiley and education-technology strategist Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning is dedicated to facilitating broad, successful adoption of OER.”
- MERLOT From the site: “The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material.”
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine From the site: “The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy.”
- OAPEN From the site: “The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.”
- Open Culture From the site: “Free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgable scholars are a relatively new phenomenon.”
- OpenEd BCcampus supports “the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia as they adapt and evolve their teaching and learning practices to enable powerful learning opportunities for the students of B.C…. We have helped British Columbia become a recognized world leader in open education, and we have a global reputation for advancing pedagogy and the use of technology for learning.”
- Open Humanities Press
- OpenStax From the site: “OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students.”
- Open Textbook Library From the site: “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.”
- Saylor Academy Textbooks From the site: “Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn.”
Open Book Collections
- Amazon Kindle Some free E-books from the public domain.
- Europeana Collections More than 51 million artworks, artifacts, books, videos & sounds from Europe.
- Google Books From the site: “Search the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books.”
- JSTOR Open Explore academic content on JSTOR that is open to everyone, everywhere. Search thousands of free journal articles and open access book chapters.
- Open Culture From the site: “Download 800 free eBooks to your Kindle, iPad/iPhone, computer, smart phone or ereader. Collection includes great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including works by Asimov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Neil Gaiman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf & James Joyce.”
- Open Culture From the site: “Download hundreds of free audio books, mostly classics, to your MP3 player or computer. Below, you’ll find great works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, by such authors as Twain, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Orwell, Vonnegut, Nietzsche, Austen, Shakespeare, Asimov, HG Wells & more.”
- Project Gutenberg From the site: “Project Gutenberg offers over 54,000 free eBooks: Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, especially older works for which copyright has expired.”
- The Public Domain Review – Books From the site: “Founded in 2011, The Public Domain Review is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.”
- Sonny Bono Memorial Collection From the site: “We believe the works in this collection are eligible for free public access under 17 U.S.C. Section 108(h) which allows for non-profit libraries and archives to reproduce, distribute, display and publicly perform a work if it meets the criteria of: a published work in the last twenty years of copyright, and after conducting a reasonable investigation, no commercial exploitation or copy at a reasonable price could be found.”
- U.S. National Library of Medicine Contains archives, films, photographs, rare books and journals and lectures.
- World Masterpieces through 1650
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