An ‘open’ textbook is a textbook created using an open copyright license, like Creative Commons, and shared with no or low cost at the point of use for students, teachers and members of the public“ https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.427/
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed.
Like traditional textbooks, open textbooks:
Open Textbooks: An Untapped Open Educational Resources For Librarians To Promote [Slides]
The Open Textbook Library is supported by members of the Open Textbook Network. The library currently includes 900+ textbooks, with more being added regularly. These books have been reviewed to assess their quality by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities.
Link: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
The MERLOT system created by California State University provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, researchers and learners.
Link: https://www.merlot.org/merlot/
Milne Library Publishing at SUNY Geneseo manages and maintains Milne Open Textbooks, a catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Link: https://milneopentextbooks.org/
This page is an index to the online textbooks in MIT OpenCourseWare. Each link under this resource takes one to a course or resource page that contains the textbook files. Some of these online textbooks are open-licensed electronic versions of print books. Others are self-published online books, or course notes which are so thorough that they serve as an alternative to a conventional textbook.
Link: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/online-textbooks/
GALILEO Open Learning Materials brings together open educational resources throughout the University System of Georgia, including open textbooks and ancillary materials.
Link: https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/
There are several textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbooks Collection (British Columbia) that are original creations or major adaptations of existing works, funded by and published by BC Campus.
Link: https://open.bccampus.ca/browse-our-collection/
The eCampusOntario Open Library provides educators and learners with access to more than 500 free and openly licensed educational resources.
Link: https://openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca/
The key objective of this initiative is to partner with key learning and teaching staff to curate and review resources for inclusion into the curriculum, encourage adoption and creation of open educational resources (OER) portal to facilitate access to quality materials.
Link: https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/oer/
Luminos is University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. It follows the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as followed for the traditional program.
Link: https://www.luminosoa.org/
The University Press in UK is one of the leading open access scholarly publishers, publishing both traditional peer-reviewed scholarly works and innovative research outputs. It has been 50+ open access books every year.
Link: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/collections/open-access
Open Book Publishers, an independent open access academic publisher of monographs in the UK is a not-for-profit Social Enterprise, run by academics who are committed to making high-quality and prize-winning research available to all.
Link: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/
Noba is a free online platform that provides high-quality, flexibly structured textbooks and educational materials. These textbooks and materials are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License. Users may reuse, redistribute, and remix the content to suit their needs.
Link: https://nobaproject.com/
The LibreText Project is a leading, non-commercial open textbook organization initiated at the University of California, Davis.
Link: https://libretexts.org/
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which is organized by courses ranging from pre-calculus to upper division analysis and algebra. Each book has a brief description of its important features and information about how to access it.
Link: https://aimath.org/textbooks/
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.
Link: https://oasis.geneseo.edu/
It helps to find Open Educational Resources. The OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 22 different sources of open educational materials.
Link: https://publishing.gmu.edu/whos-using-the-mason-oer-metafinder/
OER Commons is a public digital library of Open Educational Resources. It explores, creates, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve the curriculum.
Link: https://www.oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks
The National Digital library of India (NDLI) is a digital repository containing textbooks, articles, videos, audio books, lectures, simulations, fiction and all other kinds of learning media. The NDLI provides free of cost access to many books in English and in the Indian languages.
Link: https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/