Open - free to use and repurpose
Free - free to use
Affordable - available at low cost
Free North Shore - available to NSCC students and faculty
Do you have a comment or question about the Open Educational Resources guide? Contact us at library@northshore.edu.
Open Stax College is an initiative of Rice University to provide free, open source, peer reviewed textbooks written by professional content developers. All textbooks can be adopted or adapted by interested faculty. Supplemental resources for faculty and students are also available for each textbook. The following textbooks are currently available:
Web, PDF and ePUB versions of the textbooks are available to students free of charge while printed copies are available for the cost of printing.
OpenStax CNX is the parent initiative of Rice University's OpenStax College. OpenStax CNX is an open space repository of thousands of learning objects that can be or are already organized into books.
The Open Textbook Library is a partnership of the University of Minnesota and BC Campus to provide openly licensed textbooks that can be freely used, adapted and distributed. The textbooks can be downloaded at no cost or printed inexpensively. To locate a textbook, you can search the library or browse by subjects such as:
Some of the textbooks have reviews by faculty.
Openculture has a collection of 200 free and open textbooks. You have to scroll to see the list, but does include topics from the Arts & Humanities and the Sciences.
Here are some additional resources for locating open and low cost textbooks.
The College Open Textbooks (COT) Collaborative is a "collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges" and is "focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges." Under "Open Textbook Content", you can view featured open textbooks or browse open textbooks by subject. COT is not a repository of open textbooks but rather a listing that points to open textbooks in other open repositories.
Project Gutenberg houses over 42,000 free eBooks whose copyright has expired and are now in the public domain. The majority of the eBooks are classics that can be used in humanties and social sciences courses. To locate an eBook, you can search the entire catalog or browse by book categories such as:
The eBooks can be read online or downloaded to be read on various devices (Kindle, Android, iPad, Nook, etc.)
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative established by State University of New York libraries and supported by SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants.
This pilot initiative publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and infrastructure.
