This guide provides quick tips on locating and evaluating OER, as well as best practices for attribution.
If you are looking for free/open access e-books, we recommend the following sources:
Australian National University (ANU) Press
ANU Press has over 880 peer-reviewed publications freely available. Subjects covered include Asia and Pacific studies, Australian politics, humanities, arts, Indigenous studies and science.
Cool4Ed (California Open Online Library for Education)
Over 5,000 free e-textbooks within a collection of over 70,000 free educational resources.
Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB includes over 27, 900 titles from publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in open access. Some records provide access to selected book chapters only.
eBooks and Texts: Internet Archive
“The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed with a free archive.org account.”
ETC Press
Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC Press publishes books with a focus on games, media and technology, and education. Their entire catalogue is open access and available for PDF download
Google Books
Google Books is a searchable index of books. Some books can be downloaded or printed for free.
Note: To search for titles with full text or partial full text:
1. Go to the Advanced Search under Settings after you have done a search.
2. Limit search to Limited preview and full view or Full view only.
HathiTrust Digital Library
“HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.“
Note: To search for titles with full text, select Full-text and Full view only.
"7,800+ Open Access ebooks from 90 publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, De Gruyter, and University of California Press, are now available at no cost to libraries or users."
Library of Congress Open Access Collection
The Library of Congress provides open access to a growing collection of contemporary titles across a variety of subjects.
LibreTexts
The LibreTexts Project is a non-commercial open textbook organisation initiated at the University of California, Davis. It currently encompasses twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages.
MERLOT
“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 Press
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The database includes over 10,000 titles in PDF format. Almost all of these PDFs can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book.
NCBI Bookshelf
“Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare.”
OAPEN Online Library and Publication Platform
“OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.” The books are mainly in humanities and social sciences.
Open Book Publishers is an independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK. Books are available in PDF, HTML and XML formats.
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. The library currently includes over 700 textbooks, with more being added all the time.”
OpenlOpen Book Publishersy Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS)
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, which include more than 2,300 open textbooks.
OpenStax
OpenStax is a non-profit educational initiative based at Rice University. It offers college-level textbooks in math/statistics, science, sociology, psychology, business, economics, history, and American government, plus Advanced Placement titles. OpenStax textbooks are included in the Open Textbook Library, but this site provides additional free resources for instructors, such as PowerPoint slides and solutions to end-of-chapter problems. Optional courseware is available at an additional cost.
Project Gutenberg
“Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.”
TOME
TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) advances the dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members through open access editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs. The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) launched this five-year pilot in Spring 2017. This collaboration was previously referred to as the Open-Access Monograph Publishing Initiative (OAMPI).
University of California Press E-Books Collection
Almost 2,000 electronic editions of academic books have been published online at the UC Press E-Books Collection web site. All E-Books in the collection are available for free to UC faculty, staff, and students. Additionally, more than 25 percent of the books are available for free to the public.
Note: To search for titles with full text, select public access books from the Show dropdown menu on the search results page.
University of Oxford Text Archive
OTA is a repository of full-text literary and linguistic resources. It includes thousands of texts in more than 25 languages.
University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions
Pitt Press has selected out-of-print monographs for open access, including titles from the Pitt Latin American Series, Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies, and Composition, Literacy.
Book subject areas covers Physical Sciences, Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.
主要以图书、期刊、电子文献等各类出版物.学术文献资源集成一站式服务.
The Walter de Gruyter Foundation is a nonprofit organization that promotes research and scholarship, with a focus on the humanities.