The Mabee-Simpson Library: Open Educational Resources: Finding and evaluating OER

Best Bets

Some of the most well-known and easy-to-use OER platforms are listed below.

OpenStax
Based out of Rice University, OpenStax publishes peer-reviewed and openly licensed college-level textbooks in math, science, social science, the humanities, and business. OpenStax books come with ancillary materials such as PowerPoint slides and suggested syllabus language. Most books would be best-suited to an introductory level course.
OpenSUNY Textbooks
The State University of New York provides grants for its faculty to create these textbooks, which are also peer-reviewed by SUNY faculty. Many different subjects are covered, from nursing to leadership to writing, and at levels that range from introductory to advanced.
LibreTexts
LibreTexts offers 'libraries' in the subjects of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geosciences, humanities, math, medicine, physics, social sciences, Spanish, statistics, and workforce. In addition to textbooks, LibreTexts offers a 'course shell' option where instructors and students can remix content to best suit the needs of the class.
Open Textbook Library
The Open Textbook Library is not a publisher, but a repository that contains open textbooks from many different publishers, including OpenStax and OpenSuny. According to their website, "all textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization."

MERLOT

MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching.
MERLOT is a program of the California State University Long Beach, partnering with educational institutions, professional societies, and industry.

The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.

OER Repositories

These databases contain materials from many different OER producers.

OER Commons
A digital library and a collaboration platform, this platform contains materials beyond just textbooks (think assignments, lecture notes, and assessments) and allows searchers to filter by their students' education level, education standards, and language.
Mason OER Metafinder
This platform performs one search simultaneously across 22 different sources of OER, making it very good for finding OER for a niche area of study. You can restrict your search to OER-specific sites, or you can search other openly-licensed materials from places like the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and Project Gutenberg.

Let us search for you

Your librarians would be happy to identify a few OER textbook options for you! Fill out the following form to tell us a little more about your course subject and needs.