Free. Open-source. Peer-reviewed.
High-quality textbooks for your college course.
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.
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Online Teaching (MERLOT), developed by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning offers access to thousands of open educational materials.
OER textbooks and collections by topic and subject area.
Free textbooks (aka open textbooks) written by knowledgeable scholars are a relatively new phenomenon. Find a meta list of 200 Free Textbooks, and check back often for new additions.
A Canadian Government funded project, begun in 2012, that provides students with open textbooks and other open educational resources.
The LibreTexts project is a multi-institutional collaborative effort to improve education at all levels of higher learning by developing Open Access Resources. In a nutshell, it's a bunch of people making the world a better place by sharing the world's scientific knowledge, and you can help!
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants.
Foreign Language Resources. The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
4589 Academic peer-reviewed books from 155 publishers.
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.
Lumen Learning is dedicated to facilitating broad, successful adoption of OER.
Search within subject collections in 1,000+ Open Textbooks and Learning Resources for All Subjects.
Specializes in Psychology and Human Development textbooks. A 501(c)3 that offers free, customizable, Creative Commons licensed psychology textbooks.
A UK project that publishes books under open licences.
Art and Art History videos and essays on art from around the world and across time.
Mathematics open textbooks, many of which are free to use. All the books have been judged to meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.
Taken from: https://elon.libguides.com/oer/opentextbooks
A few large sites:
Open Textbook Initiative (American Institute of Mathematics )
Open Course Libraries (Washington state),
UBC site (University of British Columbia).
Links to many more resources:
Research Guides: Discovering Open Educational Resources (OER): Home.
Temple University Libraries guide to alternative textbook projects.
Legislation: Introduced in the 116th Congress on April 4, 2019 the Affordable College Textbook Act (H.R.2107/S.1036) would reduce the cost of textbooks at U.S. colleges and universities by expanding the use of open textbooks (and other open educational resources) that everyone can download, edit and share freely to benefit students. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/affordable-college-textbook-act/
Faculty grant programs: In 2011, the University of Massachusetts Amherst launched the Open Education Initiative (OEI), a competitive grant program to help faculty members make the switch to open textbooks in their classrooms. After disbursing 40 grants of approximately $1,000 each over the course of four years, the OEI projected student savings at almost $1.5 million.
http://opentextbookalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Open-Textbook-Alliance-Guide.pdf
