Faculty Open Educational Resource Toolkit: Textbooks

BCcampus supports the post-secondary institutions of British Columbia, and their OpenEd website provides access to open textbooks they created and lists others as well with a search tool.

Directory of Open Access Books is a joint service of OAPEN, OpenEdition, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université, provided by DOAB Foundation. The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. You can use it to search for all kinds of Open Access books, including textbooks.

A new special version of EBSCOhost made specifically to help faculty find Open Educational Resources and DRM-free e-books. Highly recommended!

H2O offers a platform for making and sharing open-licensed casebooks and other Law course materials online. It's developed and maintained today by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library.

LibreTexts is a non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis. It currently encompass twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities with over 68,500 pages.

The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and more. All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in the collection. MERLOT is a program of the California State University.

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 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.

From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons' growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER. It is a search portal for finding many kinds of OERs.

Open Culture is a private website that has a subject-sorted listing of links to free textbooks. It is also supported by donations and by paid advertisements its shows on the website.

OpenStax is one of the better-known Open Textbooks initiatives. It is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.

Open SUNY Textbooks is an open textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants and SUNY Geneseo.

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 761 textbooks, with more being added all the time. The Open Textbook Library is supported by the Center for Open Education and the Open Textbook Network.

The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

Archive.org is a well-known treasure trove of content on the internet, some of which is Open Access or public domain. This links to a page of Open Source Textbooks available on the site.

VIVA is the academic library consortium of Virginia, an d VIVA Open! is a search portal that searches OERs but also items which are only accessible by VIVA members.

OCLC WorldCat searches library catalogs from all over the world, including records of myriad media types like books, eBooks, journals, movies, video and more. There's also an "Open Access" feature that limits your search results to Open Access resources.