LibGuides: Affordable Course Materials: Find Open Educational Resources

Open Access Resources

Open access resources are created to be accessed and used freely by anyone. Open resources are free of legal, technical, and financial barriers, making education more affordable and attainable. For more information about open access resources, visit SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).

Below are links to repositories of open access resources you can use as you are planning and building courses.

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."
OpenStax CNX
"OpenStax CNX is designed to encourage the sharing and reuse of educational content. The knowledge in OpenStax CNX can be shared and built upon by all because it is reusable. There are tens of thousands of learning objects, called pages, that are organized into thousands of textbook-style books in a host of disciplines, all easily accessible online and downloadable to almost any device, anywhere, anytime."
Open Textbooks SUNY
"Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative published high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure."
Project Gutenburg
"Project Gutenberg offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education."
Project MUSE
"Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies."

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
"The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today contains ca. 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."
Elsevier Open Access
"All articles in open access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download."
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
"PLOS publishes a suite of seven peer-reviewed Open Access journals featuring quality research, expert commentary and critical analysis across all areas of science and medicine. Each journal is editorially independent and specialized with regard to its selection criteria and breadth of content. All PLOS content is freely available for the public to distribute, reuse and remix with appropriate attribution."

OER Commons
"OER Commons gathers relevant materials about teaching, technology, research, and more, and encourages you to add links to materials, projects, or news related to the emerging field of Open Education."
MIT Open Courseware
"Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT. No registration required. 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."
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."
Internet Archive - Open Educational Resources
"This library contains hundreds of free courses, video lectures, and supplemental materials from universities in the United States and China. Many of these lectures are available for download."