Biology Libguide: OER

This page contains sites that offer Open Educational Resources or Affordable Educational Resources

• College Open Textbooks

• This site has peer-reviewed more than 100 OER textbooks and provides links to many more. Also contains links to free textbooks by subject.

• Merlot

  California State University System manages a catalog of thousands of resources in science and technology, math and statistics, humanities, and education. Resources other than textbooks are offered here.

• MIT OpenCourseWare

  MIT provides an online textbook page along with links to the textbook files used in their online courses. This site is useful for course materials not covered by other sources.

• OER Commons

  The nonprofit Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education launched this site to share content from around the world. College level textbooks represent around 600 results and many are listed in other collections in this list.

• Open Culture

  This site lists a meta collection of free textbooks many taken from other sites listed here. Other collections of free online courses, movies, audio books and other forms of education content are listed.

• Open SUNY Textbooks

  A pilot project of the State Universities of New York libraries. The titles listed are authored by faculty and published by the libraries.

• Open Textbook Initiative - AIM

  The American Institute of Mathematics Editorial Board maintains a list of approved OER textbooks suitable for use in university courses. The list is searchable by subject. They also provide guidance to potential authors.

• Open Textbook Network

  Open textbooks are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost. Now offering 1547 open textbooks, the Open Textbook Library is supported by the Open Education Network.

• OpenStax College

  Rice University launched this site with 13 titles. There are now 46 in subject areas ranging from anatomy to sociology. The parent organization OpenStax CNX provides an open library of learning objects that can be utilized in custom curricula.

• Saylor Academy

  Known for its free courses, the organization also make the curriculum from each course available in downloadable textbook form.

• Wikibooks

  Wikimedia Foundation hosts this site which offers 2,900 textbooks categorized by subject, completion status and reading level. Many of the books can be downloaded as PDF files.