Subject & Research Guides: Open Textbooks: Open Textbooks

Advocacy Groups

SPARC
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.
Student PIRGs
Student Public Interest Research Groups

Open textbooks have an open copyright license that allows the material to be freely accessed, shared and adapted.
Many instructors use open textbooks, as an alternative to expensive commercial textbooks.
Open licenses allow instructors to adapt, remix, or customize existing open textbooks to maximize instructional content to meet their own learning objectives.
Many open textbooks are developed through traditional peer review, others are vetted by experts. As with any textbook, the instructor is the final judge of whether an open textbook meets the needs of the course.
They are free for anyone to view and download in an online format and can be made available in a print format at a nominal cost.
Open textbooks are part of a larger movement called "Open Educational Resources" (OER Background).
Find a list of open textbook collections on our Find Open Textbooks page.