Guides: Open Educational Resources: Textbooks

What are Open Texbooks?

Open textbooks are part of a larger movement called Open Education.
An open textbook is a textbook with a copyright licence that allows the material to be freely accessed, shared and adapted.
Open licences allow instructors to adapt, remix or customize existing open textbooks to maximize instructional content to meet their own learning objectives.
Many open textbooks are developed through traditional peer review, others are vetted by experts. As with any textbook, the instructor is the final judge of whether an open textbook meets the needs of the course.
They are free for anyone to view, download or print.

The BC Open Textbook Project is funded by the BC Ministry of Advanced Education and managed by BCcampus. A goal of the project is to provide flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in BC by making openly licensed textbooks available. These texts are available for selection by BC faculty, and digital versions of the texts are free of charge to students. For those who prefer a printed copy, this format is also available on demand for a low cost. This is the first government-funded initiative of its kind in Canada.

Find Open Textbooks

AU Press
Athabasca University Press - free pdf and low cost print version of mainly Canadian books.
BCcampus Textbooks
BCcampus open movement including textbooks.
Boundless
Boundless has high quality content and resources build by a community of educators and experts. It provides ready-to-use content, tools, and test materials
College Open Textbooks
Lists open textbooks by subjects, many of which are peer reviewed.
Directory of Open Access Books
Search for open access books from participating academic publishers.
Global Text Project
"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."
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries and their "aim to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world . It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives."
Knowledge Unlatched
"The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF."
MERLOT
Free and open resource designed primarily for higher education.
National Science Digital Library
Access to teaching and learning materials in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Search by level, resource type, and subject.
OAPEN
Contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.
OER Commons
Worldwide learning network of shared teaching and learning materials.
Open Education Global
Collaboration of higher education institutions to share and expand their open course offerings.
Open Humanities Press
An international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide.
OpenStax CNX
Content Commons of free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.
Open Textbook Library
Center for Open Education, University of Minnesota
Open Textbooks SUNY
"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".
Orange Grove Text
Florida's OER repository
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Textbook Revolution
Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors.
Wikibooks
Wikimedia's community for creating and sharing educational textbooks.
Oasis
OASIS offers users worldwide the ability to search a range of OER materials including textbooks, courses and corresponding materials, interactive simulations, public domain books, audiobooks, modules, open access books, videos and podcasts on a variety of topics — from anthropology to zoology. OASIS also is the only tool that allows users to limit searches by creative commons licenses or by faculty review.

Student Involvement in Advocating for Open Textbooks

#textbookbrokeBC
The SFU Student Society launched a letter campaign to support the Open Textbook Program that the BC Government has introduced.
Make Textbooks Affordable
Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) are campaigning to make textbooks more affordable. The say that "the real momentum comes from lasting solutions like open-source textbooks, which could literally revolutionize the textbook market by offering free online access and reducing costs up to 80%