Open Educational Resources for Teaching and learning - Open Textbooks

 

 In the rapidly changing environment of academic publishing, Open Access Textbooks are continuing to develop. These academic textbooks are published with an open copyright license. Books published under this license can be freely accessed.  This is another option students could be encouraged to use, to find their own materials. The added benefit to these resources is that they will be available to the students once they have left university. Resources can be added to Reading Lists.

Examples of Open Textbook providers include

 

Search by subject area, and then select Access - Purchased/Open Access to find freely available open access titles from Bloomsbury. Areas covered include African Studies, Classical Studies & Archaeology, Film & Media, Literary Studies, Politics & International Relations, Architecture, Design, History, Middle East, Religious Studies, Art & Visual Culture, Education, Law, Music & Sound Studies, Sociology, Biblical Studies, Fashion, Linguistics, Philosophy and Theology.

All Bloomsbury open access books can be downloaded free of charge from Bloomsbury Collections by anyone with an internet connection. You can download a PDF of the whole book, as well as individual chapter PDFs, and you may share these PDFs with others. All Bloomsbury open access books can be downloaded free of charge from Bloomsbury Collections by anyone with an internet connection. You can download a PDF of the whole book, as well as individual chapter PDFs, and you may share these PDFs with others.

 

Bristol University Press Home of Policy Press

Bristol University Press/Policy Press aims to create and disseminate critically acclaimed, evidence-based work that has the potential to make a difference in the world. It aims to publish academic scholarship that addresses global social challenges and the broader social science issues that face the world today.

 Directory of Open Access Books

The DOAB provides open access texts from publishers such as Springer & Taylor and Francis. It provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available. Top subject areas include: Sociology; Politics and Government; Society and Culture; Social Research and Statistics; Human Geography; Migration, Immigration and Emigration; Political Science and Theory; Developmental Studies; Urban and Municipal Planning; and Crime and Criminology.

 

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database containing over 16,500 peer reviewed, open access scholarly  research journals from across the globe. Covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities.

 

 OAPEN

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books. 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 OAPEN Library is optimised for search engines and is indexed by Google Scholar.  All books with an open license are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).

 Open Textbook Library

The Open Textbook Library is based in the Center for Open Education in the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. It provides access to open textbooks in a range of academic disciplines, along with reviews by staff at academic institutions. Textbooks in the Open Textbook Library are considered open because they are free to use and distribute, and are licensed to be freely adapted or changed with proper attribution. All content is openly licensed and the textbooks are available as a complete portable file (e.g. PDF, EPUB). Each book is  be in use at multiple higher education institutions, or affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization and are the original textbook (not a derivative of another textbook). 

 

 BCcampus OpenEd

 Canada's Open Education Resource is comprised of participants from open education initiatives and post-secondary institutions across the country, who share information and promote open education. The goal of the group is to improve access to higher education for students in Canada. The BCcampus Open Education  definition of open educational resources (OER): is “teaching, learning, and research resources that, through permissions granted by their creator, allow others to use, distribute, keep, or make changes to them.”
OER are teaching resources that have an open-copyright licence (such as one from Creative Commons), or they are part of the public domain and have no copyright. Depending on the licence used, OER can be freely accessed, used, re-mixed, improved, and shared.

 

 OER Texbooks

 OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources.. The OER Textbook contains over 1,300 Higher Education textbooks on a range of subjects including: Applied Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Business and Communication, Careers and Technical Education, Education, English Language Arts, History, Law, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences.

 

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched gives access to the Open Research Library (ORL)which includes Open Access book content from around the world on one platform, offering  more than 14,000 Open Access books. This contains the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone. Subjects covered include Architecture; Art; Business & Economics; Computing; education; Fiction; History; Language Arts & Disciplines; Law; Literary Collections; Literary Criticisms; Mathematics; Medicine; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Poetry; Political Sciences; Psychology; Religion; Science; Social Science; and Technology & Engineering.

 

 Milne Open Textbooks

Milne Open Textbooks began life as the Open Suny Project - an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries in 2012 and became Milne Open Textbooks in 2020. The textbooks series is a venue for SUNY faculty to share their already published openly licensed educational material. The work highlighted in this series have a variety of publishers, but are all:

• authored by a SUNY faculty member
• full courses or texts to be used in a college-level course
• original work, or a significant remix or adaptation of another open work.
• licensed with a Creative Commons license, with no ND designation

 

  OpenStax

OpenStax is a non-profit educational technology initiative based at Rice University. Since 2012, OpenStax has created peer-reviewed, openly-licensed textbooks, which are available in free digital formats and for a low cost in print. Most books are also available in Kindle versions on Amazon.com and in the iBooks Store. Subjects covered include Maths, Science, social science, humanities, and business. E-textbooks are supported by additional learning resources.

 

 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. 

 

 Springer Open Books

Springer Nature publishes open access (OA) books and chapters under its Springer, Palgrave Macmillan and Apress imprints. Springer publishes open access books and chapters across a wide range of areas within Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Business and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan publishes open access books and chapters in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Business and Economics fields, and APress is dedicated to IT and Technology.

 

  Cambridge University Press Open Access

The Cambridge University Press contains 57 open access journals, with over 43,300 open access articles, and 115 open access books.