LibGuides: Faculty Guide to UMass Lowell Library Services: Open Textbooks

Four Paths to Open Textbooks

► Adopt an e-book that is already part of the library's collection, or that the library purchases as a textbook substitute.

► Create a course packet that includes journal articles, single chapters (up to 10%) of books, and selected Open Educational Resources (OERs) published under Creative Commons licenses.

► Adopt appropriate Creative Commons textbooks written at other colleges and universities. A list of clearinghouses is below.

► Lastly, you can write and publish a textbook under a Creative Commons license, as those in the clearinghouses did.

Adopting Open Educational Resources

Open Textbook Sites

Some content in these sites is aggregated in other sites.

American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook Initiative
The AIM seeks to encourage the adoption of open source and open access mathematics textbooks. The AIM Editorial Board has developed evaluation criteria to identify the books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. The Editorial Board maintains a list of Approved Textbooks which have been judged to meet these criteria.
Saylor Academy Textbooks/STEM
OpenIntro
A Non-profit with the mission to create free introductory math and statistics textbooks.
CUNY Academic Works
CUNY Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship and creative work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all.
COERLL Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning.
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC's) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Noba
Psychology textbooks. Compiled from Noba modules to fit the scope and sequence of common courses. Use them as-is or customize them to fit your needs. Instructor manual, PowerPoint presentations, and test bank available for many modules.
Ximera
Open courses, free math. Plus computer languages.
VIVA Open Publishing: Open Educational Resources from the Virtual Library of Virginia
CORE Econ
Free online textbooks and resources for a new way of teaching and learning economics.
Open Textbook Store
A source for ready-to-adopt open textbooks. Algebra, Calculus, Statistics. Even the "Liberal Arts" offerings are math books.
WAC Clearinghouse Books
Books on the topics of writing, writing pedagogy, and critical writing theory. More than 130 books are available on this site and additional books are in production. All books are available for free viewing and/or download. Many are also available in low-cost print editions.