Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials that can be used for teaching, learning, and research at no cost! There are no access barriers, and the materials are licensed for open use. This means these resources can be used by anyone at any time!

OER come in a variety forms, including:

• Audio visual materials
• Textbooks
• Test questions 
• Simulations
• Labs 
• Presentation slides

Listed below are some individual collections and repositories for accessing open textbooks:

• OpenStax

  OpenStax is a nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University. They publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.

• Open Textbook Library

  The Open Textbook Library is sponsored by the Open Education Network (OEN) and provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.

• Wikibooks

  Wikibooks is for textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course, or for self-learning.

• BCcampus OpenEd

  BCcampus Open Education is an OER repository with hundreds of open textbooks. It's supported by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training and the Hewlett Foundation.

• Milne Open Textbooks

  Formerly called Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Open Textbooks is a service of the State University of New York -- Geneseo.

• NCBI Bookshelf

  The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Bookshelf provides free online access to over 10,000 books and documents in life science and healthcare

There are also lists and portals that offer discipline-specific OER:

• AMSER (Applied Math & Science Educational Repository)

  A portal of educational resources and services built for Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

• COERLL (Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning)

  COERLL resources contain language development and performance online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.

• MERLOT Virtual Labs

  Growing collection of free virtual labs, experiments, and simulations used in teaching the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines in higher education.

• BCcampus-OER by Discipline Guide

  The BCcampus Open Education OER by Discipline Guide lists a range of open educational resources organized by discipline. This guide is updated as new resources are identified.

• OER by Discipline Guide: McMaster University

  This annotated list of OER by discipline is itself an OER! By Joanne Kehoe and Olga Perkovic, McMaster University.

Information from this guide is adapted from the Open Education Resources Guide created by the University of Iowa Libraries.