Global Issues: Open Source Literature

Learn the basics of the Open eBooks app

The Affordable College Textbook Act seeks to reduce the cost of textbooks at U.S. colleges and universities by expanding the use of open textbooks (and other open educational resources) that everyone can use, adapt and share freely.

African American Women Writers of the 19th Century guide includes a digital collection of published works by 19th-century black women writers, biographies for each author, citations and much more

Bay View Analytics is a statistical research firm with a focus on survey design, implementation, and analysis. Formerly known as the Babson Survey Research Group, the scope of Bay View Analytics' consulting engagements includes scientific statistical analyses, clinical and pre-clinical trial design and analysis for publication and regulatory submission, and survey designs for a range of topics, with a particular focus on online education.

We are pleased to announce the release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources. This document is intended to support authors, teachers, professors, librarians, and all open educators in evaluating when and how they can incorporate third party copyright materials into Open Educational Resources to meet their pedagogical goals. Link to PDF

The letter below calls on the UK Government to investigate the practices of the academic ebook publishing industry. Ebooks are becoming increasingly unaffordable, unsustainable and inaccessible for academic libraries to purchase.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture. Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school's wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions. The Center's Faculty Co-Directors are James Boyle, David Lange, Arti Rai and Jerome Reichman. Its Director is Jennifer Jenkins. The Center is supported in its operation by a generous founding gift and by grants from foundations.

We believe that the future of education is open. We support initiatives that advance that vision coupled with tangible results that build access to resources, research, and communities committed to open education.

Digitized historical US newspapers.

CCCOER is a growing consortium of community and technical colleges committed to expanding access to education and increasing student success through adoption of open educational policy, practices, and resources. We provide a community and resources to learn about the evolving practice of open education.

Creative Commons is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public

CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Creative Commons, the nonprofit behind CC Search, is the maker of the CC licenses, used over 1.4 billion times to help creators share knowledge and creativity online.
CC Search searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.

Curationist is a free tool that makes millions of digital images of artworks and artifacts from around the world easy to access. We connect curious minds to the history, stories, and ideas these works inspire

DASH enlarges the audience and impact of your work. Authors who deposit in DASH have access to on-demand metrics and receive monthly reports about their readership. Deposited works receive persistent URLs, are comprehensively indexed by search engines, including Google and Google Scholar, reach academic and non-academic readers who may not have access to the original publications, and are preserved by the Harvard Library.

DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

Find open access journals & articles.

Electric Literature is a nonprofit digital publisher with the mission to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. We are committed to publishing work that is intelligent and unpretentious, elevating new voices, and examining how literature and storytelling can help illuminate social justice issues and current events. We are particularly interested in writing that operates at the intersection of different cultures, genres, and media.

Faded Page is an archive of eBooks that are provided completely free to everyone. The books are produced by volunteers all over the world, and we believe they are amongst the highest quality eBooks anywhere. Every one has been scanned, run through OCR software, proofed, formatted and assembled extremely carefully, using hundreds of volunteer hours. These books are public domain in Canada (because we follow the Canadian copyright laws), but if you are in another country, you should satisfy yourself that you are not breaking the copyright laws of your own country by downloading them. You are free to do whatever you like with these books, but we hope that mainly...you will enjoy reading them.

A Hathi search will discover books within copyright as well as open source. To view the copy select "Full View" next to the search box.

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

This course comprises 15 lessons covering fundamental Internet concepts. The first half of the course approaches the Internet from a user perspective. The second half of the course provides an introduction to web development. Each lesson includes a combination of Wikipedia readings, YouTube videos, and hands-on learning activities. The course also assists learners in preparing for CIW Internet Business Associate certification.

The Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE) is a Diamond Open Access journal. The journal features content concerned with OER, Open Pedagogy, Open Access, Open Data, and similar topics focusing specifically within the context of Higher Education in the United States and Canada.

LibreCommons hosts curated Open Educational Resources from all 14 LibreTexts libraries in one convenient location. LibreCommons, the LibreTexts Libraries, and all of our resources are accessible to everyone via the internet, completely free. We believe everyone should have access to knowledge.

This site serves as a repository for the work created and collated by Massachusetts Community College (MCC) faculty as part of the MCC Go Open project.

The Middlesex Community College group on OER Commons serves as a repository for OER materials created and/or collated by MCC faculty. The MCC group is part of the Massachusetts Community Colleges OER Hub.

Free Online Course materials.

Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 97 different sources and contains 385,629 records.

OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.

The OER Starter Kit Workbook is a remix of the OER Starter Kit to include worksheets to help instructors practice the skills they need to confidently find, use, or even create open educational resources (OER). We welcome instructors, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and anyone else interested in OER to explore the OER Starter Kit Workbook.

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide equal access to resources at no cost to students. This toolkit provides information and tools to help faculty and library staff across all publicly funded colleges in Ontario to understand, engage with, and sustain OER in their work and practice.

Vision: Setting the global standard in online, blended, and digital learning.
Mission: Creating community and knowledge around quality online, blended, and digital learning while driving innovation.

OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.

No bestsellers. But a wide range of scholarly monographs.

Open Access eBooks is an international publisher of eBooks. Open Access eBooks covers different disciplines of science, technology and medicine. Each eBook contains around 6 or 7 book chapters providing the latest information to the readers. Understanding the concept of Open Access and its importance in the present era, Open Access eBooks follows the principles of Open Access. It states that eBooks published in Open Access eBooks are accessed by anyone across the world. Readers can read, share, download, store, and distribute the copies of eBooks/chapters published with us without any permission/payment.

We are the leading independent Open Access publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the UK: a not-for-profit Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research freely available to readers around the world. All our books are available to read online and download for free, with no Book Processing Charges (BPCs) for authors.

The best free cultural and educational media on the web.

Internet Archive's Open Library with a Beta search

The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning open-access publisher of internationally leading academic scholarship. Our mission is to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever. Our goal is to liberate university research from commercial control. We believe that scholarship should be academic-led and community-owned.

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Browse through over 600 million items to reuse

The following titles have been made available as open access publications under a Creative Commons licence. As open access publications, these books are free to read and download on OUP online platforms as well as from OAPEN and Google Books. You can see a filtered results list of all the open access books on the Oxford Academic platform here and the open access status of titles is also flagged in our complete online product title lists which are downloadable in spreadsheet form from here.

An open access PDF version of each title is also available to download from the product page from our website. This version is free to read and share according to the terms of the applicable Creative Commons licence. Please note that third party materials included in a title may not be covered by the Creative Commons licence and remain subject to rights restrictions, in which case permission for any reuse of this material should be sought from the rights holder. Print versions of open access titles are also available to purchase from the OUP website and resellers.

Instructors, librarians, administrators, and even students can search thousands public books created on the Pressbooks Authoring & Editing Platform. The Directory includes public domain literature, CC BY open textbooks, and a vast variety of open educational resources (OER) published all along the license spectrum. More resources are added every day as Pressbooks users continue to do the good work of open education.

PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

The ROTEL initiative promotes textbook affordability, student success, and inclusion and equity to benefit all students, particularly minoritized students at our six institutions. The project will provide stipends for faculty to remix and/or develop accessible, intentionally inclusive open textbooks and other OER that reflect students’ local and lived experiences.

The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing is “[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking.” The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog aimed to help fulfill this mission by bringing together differing opinions, commentary, and ideas, and presenting them openly.

The Sigma Repository (formerly the Virginia Henderson Global Nursing e-Repository) is the only repository solely dedicated to sharing works created by nurses around the world. It is an open digital academic and clinical focused service that freely collects, preserves, and disseminates full-text nursing research, educational, and evidence-based practice materials in a variety of formats and item types. The repository is a resource of Sigma Theta Tau International (Sigma).

Workforce Pipeline Solutions Powered by the World’s Largest OPEN Library of Workforce Training Materials Designed for 21st Century Employment

Sharing knowledge is a human right.

Standard Ebooks is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, and free.
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

The Professional Research Library
The top resource for free professional and technical research, white papers, case studies, magazines, and eBooks.
May require signup for a free account.

unglue (v. t.) 4. For an author or publisher, to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an ebook.

June 10, 2021

We have created this site and provided all of our content freely, because knowledge should be free, and educational technology should lead the way!

This central Bookshelves area in this LibreTexts Library holds texts that are curated by the LibreTexts Development team and can be used either directly or as content for building customized remixes (i.e., texts that are generated from existing content often with customized editing and/or content interspersed) for use in Course Shells housed in Campus Bookshelves. There are two classes of texts found in the Bookshelves: "Textbooks" and "Textmaps". Textbooks are the central spot for integrated content into our library and are identified by "Book:" in their titles. Textmaps are specialized remixes that are constructed to follow the organization of existing commercial textbooks. Textmaps facilitate adoption by faculty that are unable to switch from a commercial textbook to an OER alternative; these texts are identified by "Map:" in their titles

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.

Requires the creation of an account

Make a difference in your students' lives with free, openly-licensed textbooks

OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. As an educational initiative, it's our mission to transform learning so that education works for every student.

Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization. The library currently includes 706 textbooks, with more being added all the time.

Pressbooks Directory provides an index of 5,071 books published across 143 Pressbooks networks.

The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, He is a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is solely responsible for the content of the site.

Democracy's Library brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006. With more than half a million documents (and counting) from local, regional, and national governments, we're just getting started!

This page lists the titles of on-line books that have recently been added to our curated collection, or whose entries have been recently revised. For a full list of available books, try the main on-line books page

Search by author or title.

We now provide two ways to browse online books by subject. You can either browse by subject term, or by call number,

Opening the world of digitised texts

Faded Page is an archive of eBooks that are provided completely free to everyone. The books are produced by volunteers all over the world, and we believe they are amongst the highest quality eBooks anywhere. Every one has been scanned, run through OCR software, proofed, formatted and assembled extremely carefully, using hundreds of volunteer hours. These books are public domain in Canada (because we follow the Canadian copyright laws), but if you are in another country, you should satisfy yourself that you are not breaking the copyright laws of your own country by downloading them. You are free to do whatever you like with these books, but we hope that mainly...you will enjoy reading them.

Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

April 27, 2023

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer-run collection of digital books mostly in the public domain. It was founded by Michael S. Hart in 1971 and is the oldest digital library. In November 2011 they reported having 38,000 volumes in their collection.

You can search by author, title, subject, and language. You can also search the latest and the most popular.

The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The American people have made a huge investment in public radio and television over many decades, calculated at more than $10 billion. The American Archive will ensure that this rich source for American political, social, and cultural history and creativity will be saved and made available once again to future generations.

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The graphing calculator feature.

A graphing calculator app available for Android, iPhone, and desktop

A graphing calculator site.

This guide provides an overview of digital privacy and the tools needed to protect libraries and its users, and thwart surveillance of our communities. This guide was developed by Library Freedom Project and Massachusetts Library Association.

A useful series of ebooks is Oxford University Press's A Very Short Introduction. Their range of subjects is very broad. You will need to log in with your MCC library password http://libguides.middlesex.mass.edu/offcampus And search for A Very Short Introduction. We have 168 titles available.

Diaries written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.

LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain. There are several options for listening. The first step is to get the mp3 or ogg files into your own computer:

Public Domain audio books and eBooks.

Tutorial from an established IT YouTuber.

February 6, 2025

May require a free account signup at the Internet Archive

Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license.

Noun Project is building a global visual language that unites us — a language that allows quick and easy communication no matter who you are or where you are.

After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical images, free for all to explore and reuse.

The internet’s source for visuals. Powered by creators everywhere.

a large collection of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute

The internationally recognized WorldImages database provides access to the California State University IMAGE Project. It has just been selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its historic collection of Internet materials. It contains approximately 100,000 images, is global in coverage and includes all areas of visual imagery. The images can be located using many search techniques on the top menu, from Search the Collection or the field-specific Search . For convenience, the images are organized into over 900 portfolios that appear alphabetically in the Portfolios screen. You can use them or explore the database using Browse. Here the portfolios are hierarchically organized beginning with continents and subject grouping.

September 11, 2023

[Cornell University Library Libguide] Open access (OA) refers to freely available, digital, online information. Open access scholarly literature is free of charge and often carries less restrictive copyright and licensing barriers than traditionally published works, for both the users and the authors.

As inclusive access (IA) programs expand across campuses, we need to be prepared to discuss them with faculty, administrators, campus stores, librarians, instructional designers, and IT staff. Here we provide some background information and talking points to get you started

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WorldCat connects you to the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide

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Select from 441 Greek and Roman works in English translation.

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The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 115,000 volumes published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day. The Library also has small holdings in manuscript collections, original artwork, and assorted ephemera such as board games, puzzles, and toys. The Baldwin Library is known for comparative editions of books, with special emphasis on Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Library also has the largest collection of Early American Juvenile Imprints of any academic institution in the United States.

Turn the pages to explore bygone eras, time-honored tales and historical narratives. Adventure awaits in these classic books online.

The ICDL Foundation promotes tolerance and respect for diverse cultures by providing access to the best of children's literature from around the world.

For those worried about student access to banned books and articles: attention!
Brooklyn Public Library has a Books Unbanned program, which allows young people in any state, age 13-21, to obtain a FREE library eCard.
This eCard provides access to their digital resources, including Libby and research databases.

Click the link for a new title.

“The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has launched The Banned Book Club to ensure that readers in communities affected by book bans can now access banned books for free via the Palace e-reader app. The Banned Book Club makes e-book versions of banned books available to readers in locations across the United States where titles have been banned. The e-books will be available to readers for free via the Palace e-reader app. “At DPLA, our mission is to ensure access to knowledge for all and we believe in the power of technology to further that access,” said John S. Bracken, executive director of Digital Public Library of America. “Today book bans are one of the greatest threats to our freedom, and we have created The Banned Book Club to leverage the dual powers of libraries and digital technology to ensure that every American can access the books they want to read.”

Book Banning has existed in America since colonial times, when legislatures and royal governors enacted laws against blasphemy and seditious libel. Legislatures in the early American republic passed laws against obscenity. Though freedom of the press has grown significantly over the course of the twentieth century, book banning and related forms of censorship have persisted due to cyclical concerns about affronts to cultural, political, moral, and religious orthodoxy.

Brooklyn Public Library joins those fighting for the rights of teens nationwide to read what they like, discover themselves, and form their own opinions. Inspired by the American Library Association's Freedom to Read Statement, BPL's Books Unbanned initiative is a response to an increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves.

The Boston Public Library (BPL) is joining the Brooklyn Public Library’s Books Unbanned initiative to fight censorship and book banning by offering teens and young adults across the nation free access to the books in its digital collection. The BPL is the third library to enter the growing network, joining Seattle Public Library.

"A remarkable initiative within Minecraft has resulted in the creation of a massive library that provides uncensored articles, journals, and information on press freedom. This virtual library offers a safe and accessible way for people living in countries with strict censorship to read otherwise restricted content. Minecraft, with its vast global reach and popularity, serves as an unexpected but effective platform for circumventing government-imposed barriers on information. This digital library is a creative solution to support freedom of expression and knowledge-sharing in a world where access to information can often be restricted." Explorify April 15, 2025

This tutorial demonstrates how to install and authenticate the EBSCO Mobile App as well as how to run a search and save articles to the app.