Open Educational Resources for Teaching and Learning: Open Textbooks

Open Textbooks

Image of digital textbooks

Open textbooks are academic texts published with an open copyright licence. This means they can usually be shared and freely accessed online, and that they can be edited or modified. So updating or adapting a portion of the text to reflect recent research or tailoring reading for a specific course is possible.

This applies to everything in the text including images, figures and diagrams. Open textbooks are made available in a variety of file formats to allow for this adaption. 

General sources of Open Textbooks

Below are a list of some of the key places to look for open textbooks. Some sites are discovery hubs searching a range of repositories containing texts and supplementary materials. Others are the host repositories, and feature curated texts accompanied by academic review.  

Image of textbookOpen Textbook Library
The Open TextBook Library is based at the University of Minnesota.  It provides lists of open textbooks in a range of disciplines, accompanied by reviews from staff at academic institutions. It is a requirement of the site that texts are available to download in a range of formats and that all books submitted are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution or scholarly/professional organisation. 

Image of textbookDirectory of Open Access Books

This discovery hub searches for open access texts in publishers such as Springer & Taylor and Francis. Advanced search filters allow you to limit your search by licence type, year and publisher. 

Image of textbookBCCampus OpenEd

Based at the University of British Columbia this collection includes around 320 accessible open textbooks reviewed by academic faculty, and shared in a range of subject areas. The site also includes some extra materials, such as quizzes, slides and videos, as well as help guides and documentation on using and adapting open textbooks. 

Image of textbookOER Open Textbooks

Collated by the non profit Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, this site is a discovery hub for open textbooks and open courseware. 

Image of textbookOAPEN
​OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is an organisation which promotes open access in Europe. The OAPEN Library searches for and hosts thousands of freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences drawn from scholarly publishers and repositories.

Image of textbookKnowledge Unlatched 
Knowledge Unlatched is an initiative where libraries work together to enable open access book publishing. In this model, books are made available when libraries share the cost of the funding fee.  Books are available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN as a fully downloadable PDF.

Image of textbookProject Guttenberg 
Project Guttenberg contains over 60,000 free eBooks which can be read online or downloaded.  It specialises in older works where copyright has expired, and contains many classics of world literarure. Books on this site have been digitised, rather than designed as textbooks.  

Image of textbookInTechOpen Books

This site contains more than 5,000 books and book chapters, with a strength in physical and health sciences. Texts are peer reviewed and published using a Gold Open Access model under the Creative Commons licences. 

Image of textbookOpenStax 
OpenStax is hosted at Rice University and contains peer-reviewed, open textbooks in the areas of Maths, Science, Social Sciences and Humanities. Texts are supplemented with instructor resources and student learning tools. 

Image of textbookOpen SUNY Textbooks
Open SUNY Textbooks is run by the State University of New York libraries. This smaller repository offers downloable textbooks for adoption on a course.

Open Education Network

Open Education Network logo

Brunel is now a member of the Open Education Network (OEN). The OEN is a community working together to inspire and facilitate the use and publication of open educational resources in education. 

Open textbooks made available through the work of the OEN can be found in the Open Textbook Library

More information about the OEN can be found on the website

Searching for Open Access Books in the Library

You can search for open-access textbooks in the Library Search discovery layer.

Look for your topic area in the Search All box, and select the filters, 'Full Text Online'. 'Open Access' and the content type 'Book/Ebook' To browse what is available. 

Publisher/Discipline Specific sources for Open Textbooks