The foundation of Open Education is Open Educational Resources (OER), which are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers, and which also carry legal permission for open use. Generally, this permission is granted by use of an open license (for example, Creative Commons licenses) which allows anyone to freely use, adapt and share the resource—anytime, anywhere. “Open” permissions are typically defined in terms of the “5R’s”: users are free to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute these educational materials. Read More
OER Facts
Want more information about Open Education Resources? Watch the video and explore the links below.
Open Education Textbooks and Materials Links
Below is a list of links to collections of OER Materials in use across many college campuses.
- arxiv.orgarXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,677,038 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
- BCcampusUniversity of British Columbia's Open Textbook catalog.
- bioRxivbioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution.
- California Open Online Library for EducationThe three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.
- Hawai'i OpenHawai‘i Open is a portal for open access content from University of Hawai‘i Press. Including both books and journals, Hawai‘i Open includes titles from throughout UH Press’s publication history in Asian, Hawaiian, and Pacific studies made available in OA format through private sponsorship, Knowledge Unlatched, and the Humanities Open Book program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- medrxiv.orgmedRxiv (pronounced "med-archive") is a free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts (preprints) in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences.
- OpenStax Textbooks from Rice UniversityPeer-reviewed. Openly licensed. 100% free and backed by additional learning resources. Review our OpenStax textbooks and decide if they are right for your course. Simple to adopt, free to use. We make it easy to improve student access to higher education.
- OTN - Open Textbook LibraryOpen 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 703 textbooks, with more being added all the time.
- SSRNSSRN´s eLibrary provides 919,025 research papers from 466,734 researchers in more than 50 disciplines.
- Taylor & Francis Open Access eBooks This link opens in a new windowExplore Open Access eBooks published by Taylor & Francis, and discover content available across subject areas including economics, environment & sustainability, geography, history, law, media & cultural studies, politics, sociology and more.
Attribution and License
In the spirit of OER, parts of this guide are a re-mixed and customized version of a guide created Kim Read at Concordia University and a guide created by Cody Taylor from the University of Oklahoma. The Research page is a re-mixed version of a guide page created by Jen Klaudinyi from Portland Community College. All original content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All linked-to content adheres to its respective license.