Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions" (2012 Paris OER Declaration). Similar, Open Textbooks are free or low-cost substitutes for a traditional textbook. For instance, OpenStax, offers peer-reviewed OER textbooks that are Cengage adaptable to fit within the LU requirements at a minimal cost.
Open Educational Resources are created to be used through Creative Commons licenses. Users have the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute an OER. Each OER should have a license explaining the uses available for the user.
OpenStax an initiative of Rice University with support from foundations like Hewlett and the Gate’s Foundation. The textbooks peer-reviewed. OpenStax books are Cengage adaptable to fit within LU requirements at a reduced cost.
OpenStax CNX an extension of OpenStax, a repository of open-access textbooks and curricular materials.
Pressbooks Directory - this directory provides an index of OER books published by faculty who use Pressbooks in higher education. Pressbooks is an e-publisher for open and online education materials.
Teaching Commons – a collection of OERs available through Liberty University Scholars Crossing Institutional Repository. The OERs are from other institutions that also use the Digital Commons platform
Creative Commons – a collection of Creative Commons licensed materials.
VIVA Open Virginia's Academic Library Consortium OER resource.
MIT Open Courseware openly published MIT course content that covers the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
OER Commons a search engine that makes various OERs of different levels discoverable.
MERLOT a project of the California State University System contains links to open textbooks from a variety of sources (peer review indicators).
Milne Open Textbooks an initiative of the State University of New York libraries with support from SUNY grants (peer-reviewed).
BCcampus OpenEd a collection of open textbooks created by BCcampus.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) a collection of peer-reviewed open access books with Creative Commons licenses.
InTech an open access publisher of books and journals in science, technology, and medicine.
Libre Texts a multi-institutional collection of higher learning textbooks.
Open Textbook Library an aggregation of openly licensed textbooks.
Open Textbook Store a catalog of open textbooks collected by educators to make them more easily adoptable in courses.
OpenCourse Library a collection of expertly developed OER courses for Washington State Community College.
arXiv.org Open access to 1,612,055 e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
engrArXiv Open Access (OA) archive for scholarly papers in engineering. Materials are available to read and link to but might not be available for reuse.
These sites offer free to use books. To avoid plagiarism make sure your cite/give attribution to the author.
Directory of Open Access Books A collection of peer reviewed open access books with Creative Commons license.
Librivox Free public domain audiobooks.
Project Gutenberg Free eBooks.