LibGuides: Open Educational Resources: Open Textbooks

What is an open textbook?

An open textbook is an openly-licensed textbook offered online by its author(s). The open license sets open textbooks apart from traditional textbooks by allowing users to read online, download, or print the book at no additional cost.

For a textbook to be considered open, it must be licensed in a way that grants a baseline set of rights to users that are less restrictive than its standard copyright.[6][7] A license or list of permissions must be clearly stated by the author.[8]

Generally, the minimum baseline rights allow users at least the following:

to use the textbook without compensating the author
to copy the textbook, with appropriate credit to the author
to distribute the textbook non-commercially
to shift the textbook into another format (such as digital or print)

Source: Varied Characterizations of Open Textbooks

Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know

OER Textbooks

The repositories below host numerous open textbooks:

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
Contains thousands of open access academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from hundreds of publishers.
InTechOpen
Open Access book publisher for science, medicine and pharmacy. Provides free online access to research since 2004. Built by scientists, for scientists.
IOM Reports
OM (Institute of Medicine) reports published after 1998.
LibreTexts
Non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis.
Merlot Open Textbooks
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) is a program of the California State University System. MERLOT Open textbooks include thousands of peer-reviewed titles on a broad range of subjects.
National Academies Press
Many of the books published by the National Academies Press can be downloaded for free in PDF format. Search the Health and Medicine collection.
NCBI Bookshelf
Provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Search, read, and discover.
OER Commons: Open Textbooks
Catalog containing hundreds of open textbooks from higher education institutions around the world.
openstax
A nonprofit initiative of Rice University whose mission is to minimize the most common barriers to education. OpenStax publishes peer reviewed textbooks that meet standard scope and sequence requirements, but can be customized to meet the needs of particular classes.
Open Textbook Library
Provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
Teaching Commons U.S.
High-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, it includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.
Textbook Revolution
"Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of OERs by teachers and professors." The site contains links to and reviews of OER textbooks and other OER material.

Find the right Open Textbook

The Mason OER Metafinder (below) searches across 18 different sources of open educational materials.

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 88 different sources and contains 352,755 records.