Guides: Open Educational Resources Guide: Open Textbooks

Open Textbook Network

The Catholic University of America is a member of the Open Textbook Network, a group of colleges and universities has joined together to produce openly-licensed textbooks -- written by academics and peer-reviewed, but made available online for free use by all.

Open Textbook Network

OER Resources by Discipline

Catholic University's liaison librarians have included discipline-specific OER resources in many of their subject guides. To access OER resources by discipline, choose a subject from the list below.

Open Textbooks

Open textbooks are licensed under an open copyright license and are free for use by students, faculty, and the public. They may be distributed in traditional print format as well as e-book and audio formats. Many of the general search engines and repositories offer access to open textbooks, but here are some more specific resources:

BCOpen Campus
Search for and download quality open textbooks offered in a variety of digital formats.
Cool4Ed - eTextbook
Free and open textbooks from the California Open Online Library for Education.
Directory of Open Access Books
“A joint service of OAPEN, OpenEdition, CNRS and ... 29376 Academic peer-reviewed books from 388 publishers.”
InTech
The world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Lyryx Learning
Vetted, open, and free textbooks in business, mathematics/statistics, and economics.
MERLOT Open Textbook
OpenStax/Connections
A place to find, adopt, and adapt textbooks and associated materials and to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc.
Open Textbook Library
Currently includes more than 700 textbooks, with more being added all the time. All books in the Open Textbook Library are either used at multiple institutions or affiliated with an institution or a scholarly/professional organization, and all are evaluated and reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities. Download any textbook in the Library for free, or print for a small fee.
Saylor Academy Open Textbooks
Free textbooks in a variety of subjects from Saylor Academy, “a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn.”
SpringerOpen Books
Offers authors the option to publish their books and chapters open access, making their research freely available to anyone with internet access.