Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Open Access Textbooks

Why Open Textbooks?

This guide encourages you to consider adopting and/or writing open access texts. Relevant facts include these:

College textbook prices have increased 812% since 1978. The Consumer Price Index has increased 250% during this time. (Perry, 2012)
The average student in the U.S. spends $1137 annually on textbooks. (College Board, 2013)

Source: Perry, M. J. (2012, December 24.) The college textbook bubble and how the open educational resources movement is going up against the textbook cartel [blog post]. Retrieved fromhttp://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/the-college-textbook-bubble-and-how-the-open-educational-resources-movement-is-going-up-against-the-textbook-cartel/

Open Textbooks

About Open Textbooks

An Open Access Textbook is an instructional textbook publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on computers or other electronic devices, such as e-readers or tablets, that is made freely available through a host or online organizational service. Open Access Textbooks may have certain copyright restrictions, but these restrictions normally do not limit dissemination, repurposing, creating derivative works and use for educational purposes.

Although rapidly evolving, textbooks in electronic form are available in three dominant models:

Open Access Textbooks
Commercial Electronic Textbooks
Hybrid of Open Access/Commercial E-Textbooks

Small Collections of Open Textbooks

Bay College OER
This small collection of OER textbooks were developed by faculty at Bay College. The topics include career exploration and U.S. History.
Green Tea Press Open Textbooks
This collection of open textbooks focus on computer science topics.
NOBA Project
The NOBA project features textbooks, modules, and test bank questions for general psychology textbooks.
Introductory Financial Accounting Textbook
This open textbook was developed by faculty at West Chester University.

Open Textbook Guides

Seven Things You Should Know about Open Textbook Publishing
Published March 2011 by Educause

OER by Discipline Guide An Open Education reference of OER listed by subject area and disciplines with McMaster academic programming.

Selected Providers

LibreTexts
The LibreText Project is a non-commercial open textbook organization encompassing twelve widely used college-level disciplines from chemistry to humanities.
College Open Textbooks
Portal to hundreds of open access college textbooks across the curriculum.
Orange Grove: Florida's Digital Repository
Collection of open books and textbooks from a variety of sources.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are real, complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material. Open textbooks can be downloaded for no cost, or printed inexpensively.
OpenStax College
OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials, affiliated with OpenStax CNX. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.
Wikibooks
Contains nearly 3,000 open content textbooks across a variety of subjects
Open Ed BCcampus
The University of British Columbia created the BC Open Textbook Project which features 152 open textbooks in various subjects. A number of textbooks feature faculty review and supplemental resources.
Lumen Open Textbooks
Lumen Learning is an organization working towards expanding OER resources and reducing college costs for students. They have a variety of texts and other resources available.
Open SUNY Texbook Project
This project is based at SUNY and it includes books on various topics from English composition to nursing. Additional features, like integration within Blackboard are available to faculty for a small fee.