Collections

There are a number of sites dedicated to archiving and collecting open textbook collections. Here are a few sites that can help you find an open textbook to meet your needs.

• B.C. Open Textbook Collection is home to a growing selection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties many of which have been reviewed by faculty, meet accessibility requirements, and/or include supplementary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).
• Open Textbook Library, from the Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota and the Open Textbook Network, is a curated referatory containing hundreds of open textbooks.
• OpenStax publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks written by subject experts. OpenStax also hosts CNX, a content management system that has tools for educators to build and customize content within its repository.
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a joint effort between individual community colleges, regional and statewide consortia, the Open Education Consortium, the American Association of Community Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College, and many other educational partners to develop and use open educational resources, open textbooks, and open courseware to expand access to higher education and improve teaching and learning.

In addition, there are a few more more general-purpose OER repositories that you might find useful when searching for open textbooks. These repositories may contain open textbooks in addition to many other types of open educational resources.

• MERLOT is one of the first and largest OER repositories. MERLOT is a program of the California State University System.
• OER Commons was created by ISKME in 2007. The site provides access to a growing collection of 50,000 OER.
• SOL*R (Shareable Online Learning Resources) is the BCcampus repository of open educational resources. Much of the materials in this collection are resources that have been created by B.C. post-secondary educators through the Online Program Development Fund (OPDF).

Searching for openly-licensed content

While we are focusing specifically on finding open textbooks in this guide, there are ways to conduct more general searches for openly licensed content using search engines. For more information, see Resources: Search and Find in the Self-Publishing Guide.