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Open Educational Resources (OER): Open Textbooks Collections

This guide provides information about Open Educational Resources, including open textbooks, and where to find them.

Open Textbook Collections

The Open Textbook movement focuses on the creation and use of books which are openly licensed -- in short, free and editable. These textbooks are also openly licensed with a Creative Commons meaning that dependent on the license, they may be legally displayed/uploaded/hosted, distributed, modified, etc. without fee, permission, or conducting a fair use analysis. (See Creative Commons for more information on the various CC open licenses.) 

Many of the collections will have links to the same books, but each collection has items unique to their collection.

Additional books that are not technically "open" are also listed. They may be "free online" but subject to copyright, or they may be low cost options.

 

Open Textbooks (free and openly licensed)

Current OpenStax college level books include: Cover images of OpenStax textbooksFind ancillary materials for each book at https://openstax.org/subjects or ancillaries shared by other faculty members at: https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/OpenStax

Books in the Public Domain

Readings

GMU OER MetaSearch

In conjunction with Deep Web Technologies, University Libraries is developing a search engine that simultaneously queries more than a dozen sources of educational materials–content that is open access and immediately available for use in your courses. We’re still adding search targets but today our OER Metafinder searches fifteen sites and returns the top 250 or so hits from each site–in seconds!

Search: Mason OER Metafinder
 

Open Teaching Resources

 

 

Open Source Statistical Software

R: https://cran.r-project.org/

RStudio: www.rstudio.com 

Field Guides: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/codee/vol10/iss1/2/