LibGuides: Sociology Texts Available Free to Students: Library Subscriptions and Open Access Options: Home

Pathways to Open Access

FREE TEXTBOOK CATALOG

This guide features textbooks that UMass Lowell subscribes to via Knovel, EBSCO, E-Brary, and other vendors as well as open textbooks. Librarian Margaret Manion researched a wide range of potential texts. The links to each subject area are on the left.

You can use these books at no charge to supplement or replace a course textbook.

Please note: before adopting one of these books as a course text, please check with Margaret Manion to verify that the e-book will continue to be available all semester, and there are no limitations on simultaneous users or page downloads.

Please contact Margaret with suggestions for additional areas where we can discover and share free textbook options.

Search On Your Own

SEARCH FOR A FREE TEXTBOOK

In addition to the lists of books presented in this guide, we want to share links to selected UMass Lowell subscription databases as well as open access sites where you can find open access texts for your courses.

Expanded List of Sites for Textbook Options

Some content in these sites is aggregated in the indexes above.

California Open Online Library for Education
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.
Affordable Learning Georgia
Open Textbooks SUNY
A service to provide OER from State University of New York, these textbooks are free and open to all institutions. Browse available titles or the SUNY catalog to find learning materials suitable for your courses. You can link to our page, or you can upload the PDF or ebook in your LMS.
Lumen Learning
Lumen Learning’s mission is to enable unprecedented learning for all students by providing affordable course materials designed to strengthen learning using open educational resources (OER). Applies learning science insights and learning data analysis to develop improvements to our course materials and learning tools.
Saylor Academy Textbooks/STEM
OpenIntro
A Non-profit with the mission to create free introductory textbooks. Strong in Math.
Open Course Library
The Open Course Library (OCL) is a collection of shareable course materials, including syllabi, course activities, readings, and assessments designed by teams of college faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and other experts. Some of our materials (also called open educational resources, or OER) are paired with low cost textbooks ($30 or less).
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.
Open Textbook Store
A source for ready-to-adopt open textbooks. Algebra, Calculus, Statistics. Even the "Liberal Arts" offereings are math books.

UMass Lowell Library Subscriptions

eBook Central
Contains over 120,000 titles covering all key academic subject areas.
EBSCO eBook Collection
A multi-disciplinary collection of over 200,000 ebooks covering a large selection of academic subjects from leading publishers.

Assistance

Librarian Margaret Manion is developing pathways to free, open textbooks at UMass Lowell and beyond.

Please contact Margaret if you are planning to use a particular open text, or if you want assistance in discovering an open text to adopt.

LibGuides Production Editor Meg Shields is creating a library of guides that incorporate the
pathways to open educational resources.