Please note: This guide is in the process of being updated. Check back soon for updates and visit our Open Educational Resources guide for additional information!
Open textbooks are a type of open educational resource (OER). OERs are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others" (Hewlett Foundation). In the case of OER, the term "open" usually means that an author has chosen to give others permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute copies of the content, which David Wiley calls the "5Rs of openness" (2014.)
Open textbooks are available for free online. The range of subject coverage and the number of publications is steadily increasing. Although open textbooks are born digital, students who prefer print books can print all pages themselves or request a printed and bound copy from the university bookstore or other retailer for a small fee (Senack, 2014).
Note: A Google search for [your subject] + open textbooks often yields results, too. Look for titles endorsed by an academic society, funded by a foundation or grant, or in use at a number of colleges or universities.
Slide decks, problem sets, videos, and other supplemental files may be available from OER collections, including:
Find additional OER repositories/collections on this page of the portal.
This LibGuide was created in 2016 by Abbey Elder, Information Science graduate student, with the supervision of Rachel Caldwell, former Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It is being updated during Summer 2024. For additional information about Open Educational Resources, please visit our OER Guide