Learning Resources Division: Open Educational Resources (OER): Find OER

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 750 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.

Open Textbook Library Records
Click this link to be taken to the Open Textbook Library books available through the UDC catalog.

Course Resources

The following websites have libraries of open textbooks and other course materials like syllabi and other ancillary material. Some resources even include full courses.

Best Places to Start

LibreTexts
The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
OpenStax
OpenStax is more than books. They’ve developed LMS course cartridges, lecture slides, and more – and they're creating extra resources to help instructors teach online. Visit the “Instructor resources” tab of each book page to learn more.
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 766 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.

Additional Resources

GALILEO Open Learning Materials
GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
Lumen Learning
Discover affordable, simple-to-adapt OER course materials that improve learning
The Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites (e.g, OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, etc.) with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button.
MERLOT
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
MIT Open Courseware
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. There is material from over 2,400 courses.
OASIS
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.
Open Course Library
A collection of high quality, free-to-use courses that you can download and use for teaching. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse and download.
PhET Interactive Simulations
PhET provides fun, free, interactive, research-based science and mathematics simulations.
Saylor Academy
Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. They offer nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels.
SkillsCommons
SkillsCommons’ mission is to accelerate the democratization of education for all through open educational services and resources enabling individuals, communities, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses to prepare people for successful employment in the 21st Century.
Teaching Commons
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.
Wisc-Online
Wisc-Online maintains a reputation for building quality learning management systems, innovative instructional design, and concise learning application development. Their expert instructors in the fields of health, science, mathematics, technology, industry, and general education create study aides that are proven to help users earn higher test scores and better grades.

Books

Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
HathiTrust
Founded in 2008, 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. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.
Internet Archive - Texts
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 by anyone with a free archive.org account.
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. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.

Journals and Articles

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 22% of which comes from sponsors and 78% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available. DOAJ operates an education and outreach program across the globe, focussing on improving the quality of applications submitted.
JURN
Search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses.
Public Library of Science (PLOS)
PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading Contains more than 140,000 peer reviewed open access articles, focusing on biology and medical science. PLOS authors publish under the Creative Commons Attribution License. a transformation in research communication.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
Springer Open
SpringerOpen, launched in June 2010, includes Springer’s portfolio of 200+ peer-reviewed fully open access journals across all areas of science.

Multimedia

OER is not limited to text. There are tons of available multimedia resources from which you can draw content. The resources listed in this tab are not exhaustive but include an example of what's available.

If you need a particular kind of resource, our reference librarians are available to help you find it. Contact us at ask@udc.libanswers.com.

Audio material is often freely available through podcasts and websites like YouTube.

OER at the UDC Library

Did you know that you can also use existing library resources in your courses? Instead of or in a supplement to textbooks or OER resources, you can add articles, multimedia, and ebooks that are available through the library to your syllabus.

You can search our UDC Search catalog or visit the A to Z Resource List to find material for your course.

UDC library faculty are also available to help you find, review, and create OER material. To connect with a librarian, just email us at ask@udc.libanswers.com.

Open Educational Resources (OER)