LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER) and Affordable Course Content (ACC): Find OER

Open Educational Resources: Textbooks and More

B.C. Open Collection
This collection includes textbooks, course packs, lecture notes, exams, syllabi, and more.
LibreText Commons
This repository contains open textbooks and corresponding homework assignments, which can also be used with other OER or commercial texts.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
Search across dozens of open education repositories at once.
MERLOT
The MERLOT Collection is made up of over 100,000 materials in 24 different material type categories and growing.
OER Commons
OER Commons has forged alliances with over 500 major content partners. Users can search across over 42,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery.
OpenStax College
A nonprofit organization. Free textbooks are developed & peer-reviewed by educators. Also provides modules & other open learning resources.
OASIS
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 132 different sources and contains 447,775 records.
VIVA Open!
Explore VIVA's (Virtual Library of Virginia) collection of Open Education Resources (OER) adopted, adapted, and/or created by faculty and higher education professionals at Virginia institutions. Join the network of educators committed to open education.

Textbook-Only Repositories

Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library includes books that have been peer-reviewed by faculty at various institutions. It is a great place to start in your search for an open textbook. It includes books from OpenSTAX, SUNY, and other creators of open textbooks. 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.
PressBooks Directory
Pressbooks Directory is a free, searchable catalog that includes over 7,000 open access books published by nearly 200 organizations and networks using Pressbooks. It's easy to copy, revise, remix, and redistribute any openly licensed content found here using Pressbooks' publishing platform. Nearly all books are highly accessible, and many include interactive H5P learning activities to engage learners.
Milne Open Textbooks (SUNY Geneseo)
A catalog of open textbooks authored and peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty and staff.
Free ECE Textbook Initiative
A collection of free textbooks for electrical and computer engineering.
Open Textbooks for Engineering
Collection of engineering textbooks organized by discipline.
Wikibooks
A collection of open-content textbooks.

Open Course Materials

Teaching Commons
Curated by universities, includes open textbooks, course materials, multimedia, and more.
MIT Open Courseware
A free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.
Open Washington
Contains videos, images, course materials, and textbooks, and modules for learning about OER.
OpenOregon
Open resources created and used by Oregon community college and university instructors to reduce textbook costs in their courses.
Project CORA
An open-access resource for librarians and faculty. Includes information literacy and research assignments that can be modified for your classes.
OAister
OAister is provided by WorldCat and searches for only open access materials cataloged in libraries worldwide, including dissertations and theses
Lumen Learning
Provides customizable courses and course content and textbooks. Sometimes fees apply.
Cool4Ed
The three State of California Higher Education Systems are working together to provide you easy access to quality FREE and OPEN eTextbooks that everyone and anyone can use for teaching and learning.
SkillsCommons
A comprehensive collection of workforce-related Open Educational Resources (OER).

Open eBook Collections

Directory of Open Access Books

Harvests open access eBooks, and provides an option to purchase print copies.
Internet Archive Books

Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts, and academic books.
JSTOR Open Access eBooks

JSTOR offers a growing list of Open Access eBooks from respected presses, such as University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, and ANU Press. More than 6,500 titles are now available at no cost to libraries or users. Check out this page to view a title list and access eBooks!
Project Gutenberg

Provider of free eBooks. Especially useful for literature classes and children's books.
Project MUSE: Open Access On MUSE

Project MUSE offers open access (OA) books and journals from several distinguished university presses and scholarly societies. Through our open access hosting programs, we are able to offer publishers a platform for their OA content which ensures visibility, discoverability, and wide dissemination. These books and journals are freely available to libraries and users around the world.

OAPEN
OAPEN connects libraries, publishers, researchers, and funders with a global infrastructure for peer-reviewed open access books to advance research and the public good. Works are CC-BY unless otherwise noted.

Open Images & Media

CC Search Portal
Find CC-licensed content (images, audio, video) by searching multiple CC-integrated platforms with a single search query. Platforms include Openverse, Google, Flickr, SoundCloud, and more.
Getty Open Content Images
Growing collection of high-resolution images available for free download under the Getty's Open Content Program.
TED Talks
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas. The talks are usually short (18 minutes or less) and powerful, covering all almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages.
YouTube
Many YouTube videos have creative commons licenses that allow for sharing and reusing. Search for your topic, and then click the FILTER option -- under "Features," select "Creative Commons." Under "About" or "Show more," look for the License. Note: Always look for obviously pirated material and be aware that YouTube content can disappear.

See also our guide on Images, Audio, Video for more open resources.

Digital Collections

Many museums, universities and organizations have made their primary source materials (ie, images, documents, media) available online under an open license and available for use as Open Educational Resources. Below are just a few searchable collections to consider.

Digital Public Library of America
A growing collection of millions of digitized materials (images, audio, video, text) from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience. Users can limit by copyright status, among other filters, and guidelines are provided.
Library of Congress: Free to Use and Reuse Sets
Items from the Library of Congress Digital Collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use. Each set of content is based on a theme and is first featured on the Library's home page.
ODU Libraries Digital Collections
The ODU Libraries have been creating digital collections from primary source materials in the Special Collections and University Archives Department for several years.
Florida Open Academic Library
A digital inventory of Florida's archives and collections.

Open Data

Google Dataset Search
Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets. Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.

Use our Research Data Management guide to search data repositories for open data.