Open Educational Resources: Open Texts

From the California State University-Merlot program, this site provides a tool for quickly finding open textbooks and resources (with Creative Commons licenses) for use in your courses. Though designed for CSU and a larger California statewide OER program, the discovery tools are available to any users. Click on the "Find" dropdown menu to start.

Initiative of the British Columbia government, this site includes reviews of open texts that may help you the choice of OERs.

E-books freely available for anyone to use. Each ebook carries one of six Creative Commons licenses determined by the publisher. The titles are easy to use, with no DRM restrictions and no limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing. Users will not need to register or log in to JSTOR.

The Internet Archive and Open Library offers over 10,000,000 fully accessible books and texts. There is also a collection of 300,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed or downloaded by the print-disabled at OpenLibrary.org.

A listing of open-source or open-access texts that have been judged to meet the evaluation criteria set by the AIM editorial board.

Cornell Open is the new global open access portal for classic out-of-print titles from the distinguished catalog of Cornell University Press. Funded by the newly created Humanities Open Book Program, a collaborative effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell Open offers for the first time open access to key titles in literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies.

Open access texts published by the University of Michigan Press. digitalculturebooks content is available to view for free online and for purchase in print and ebook format.

Online PDF versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought. The texts were prepared by scholar/author Jonathan Bennett (University of Cambridge, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, Syracuse University).

Open textbooks and ancillary materials from Affordable Learning Georgia.

The Humanities Digital Library is the open access library and catalogue for books published by the School of Advanced Study, University of London. It forms part of the School’s mission to embrace the opportunities of digital content delivery and enable greater access to knowledge. The Humanities Digital Library is managed by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS). Each title is published as an open access PDF, with copies also available to purchase in print and EPUB formats.

InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Educators are freely permitted to use the material for teaching, conference presentations, lectures and other non-commercial professional activities.

LibreTexts is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access texts to improve STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) at all levels of higher learning. The LibreTexts approach is highly collaborative where an Open Access textbook environment is under constant revision by students, faculty, and outside experts to supplant conventional paper-based books. Material available in Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Social Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Agriculture, Photosciences, and Humanities.

Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs.

The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for two decades, supporting a variety of open access funding models for select books, including monographs, trade books, and textbooks.

Online textbooks corresponding to MIT OpenCourseWare. 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.

Bookshelf, the books division of the National Library of Medicine Literature Archive (LitArch) at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is an online searchable collection of books, reports, databases, and other scholarly literature in biology, medicine, and the life sciences. Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.

Noba features more than 100 college-level chapters (focused on psychology topics), written by experts and licensed under Creative Commons, that can be used to build customized digital textbooks. Search the catalog of chapters; organize the topics and chapters in the order you choose; “publish” the resulting digital text either online or as a downloadable PDF.

The OAPEN Foundation is a non-profit foundation dedicated to Open Access publishing of academic books. OAPEN provides a platform for the full text dissemination of Open Access books and provides services to publishers and libraries. OAPEN builds a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences, and develops services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.

The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. Founded and edited by John Mark Ockerbloom in 1993, OBP is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. The site features an index of over 2 million online books freely readable online.

Open Book Publishers, founded in 2008, is the biggest open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK and amongst the leaders in the English-speaking world. The books are published in hardback, paperback, PDF and ebook editions, but they also include a free online edition that can be read via the website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere.

OpenEdition Books is a web platform for books in the humanities and social sciences.

From the Internet Archives: over 2,000 textbooks, divided into sub-collections by discipline.

There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device. Search by discipline and filter searches by content type (e.g. book), subject, author, publication year, etc.

OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today’s student budgets.

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. This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.

Open textbooks are complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively. This library is a tool to help instructors find affordable, quality textbook solutions. All textbooks in this library are complete and openly licensed.

The Orange Grove repository is Florida's digital repository for instructional resources. The repository provides an environment for educators to search for, use, remix, share, and contribute educational resources. The repository can also be integrated with your Learning Management Systems.

100+ Free Textbooks for Students, Educators, and Families.

Online collection of original articles, primary source texts, and commentaries in the fields of philosophy and ethics. The Topical Arrangement of Sources page is especially helpful.

The American Yawp offers a free and online, collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for college-level history courses. All contributors - experienced college-level instructors - volunteer their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century classrooms. Low-cost print version should be available in August 2018.

Digital History was designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges. The materials on this site include a U.S. history textbook; over 400 annotated documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, supplemented by primary sources on slavery, Mexican American, Asian American, and Native American history, and U.S. political, social, and legal history; succinct essays on the history of film, ethnicity, private life, and technology; multimedia exhibitions; and reference resources that include a database of annotated links, classroom handouts, chronologies, glossaries, an audio archive including speeches and book talks by historians, and a visual archive with hundreds of historical maps and images.

On online text/course from the Core Team (a global community of teachers, learners, and researchers). Additional resources for instructors are available.

Publisher of three statistics textbooks. All come with additional course materials (e.g. videos, labs, lecture slides).

Trivium is a free online art history book, sharing the diverse stories of human creativity. Trivium Art History brings together high-resolution images of artworks, easy-to-read biographies, and rare artist writings to create a dynamic textbook - an always growing platform for exploring art history.

William H. Reusch’s (emeritus professor at Michigan State) Introduction to Organic Chemistry.