LibGuides: Open Source Literature: Home

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No cost resources during COVID-19

Open Access Apps

APP
Learn the basics of the Open eBooks app

Organizations that promote open source

The Atlas of New Librarianship Online
Bay View Analytics
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.
Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources
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
Campaign to investigate the academic ebook market
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.
Center for Open Education (University of Minnesota)
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.
Community College Consortium for OER
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
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
Creative Commons Search
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.
Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH)
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.
Digital Public Library of America Exchange
DPLA is proud to help lead the growing community of libraries using SimplyE and the Library Simplified open-source software, developed and hosted by The New York Public Library.
The Digital Theological Library
Directory of Open Access Books
Directory of Open Access Books is a joint service of OAPEN, OpenEdition, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université

more... less...

No best sellers but a wide range of scholarly monographs.
Electric Lit
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.
The Free Library
Hatha Trust Digital Library Search
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.
Internet Fundamentals (Wikiversity)
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.
Knowledge Unlatched
Massachusetts Community Colleges OER Hu
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.
MCCLibOER
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.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Free Online Course materials.
Mobius Consortium
MOBIUS joined the Open Textbook Network, an alliance of hundreds of colleges, universities, and consortia partners working together to advance the use of open textbooks in higher education, in the summer of 2017. Textbook affordability is a major concern on college campuses throughout the United States and this is an exciting partnership that allows us to provide member libraries with tools and services that will assist them in building sustainable open textbook programs on their campuses. MOBIUS membership means that all of our member libraries will have access to OTN resources and trainings.
OASIS
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
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
OER Starter Kit (City Universary of New York)
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.
OER Toolkit
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.
Online Learning Consortium
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.
Online Library and Publication Platform
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.
Open Access Publishing in European Networks
No bestsellers. But a wide range of scholarly monographs.
Open Acess eBooks
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.
Open Book Publishers
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.
Open Culture
The best free cultural and educational media on the web.
Open Library Explorer
Internet Archive's Open Library with a Beta search
Open Research Community
Open Research Library
Open Syllabus
Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.
Open Textbook Library
Open Textbook Pilot Program (SPARc)
2020 with background
OpenVerse from Creative Commons
Browse through over 600 million items to reuse
Pressbooks Directory
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.
Public Domain Day--Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Public Domain Review
The Scholarly Kitchen
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.
SIGMA Repository
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).
SpringerOpen Open Access Books
Standard Ebooks
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.
Tradepub
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.it
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.
We’re Launching the CC Open GLAM Program
June 10, 2021

Open Source Textbooks

160 Free Textbooks--A Meta Collection
Books in Language Education (sorted by popularity)
EdTech Books
We have created this site and provided all of our content freely, because knowledge should be free, and educational technology should lead the way!
HippoCampus.org
HippoCampus.org is a free, core academic web site that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animation, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle-school and high-school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge. Teachers project HippoCampus content during classroom learning and assign it for computer labs and homework. Students use the site in the evenings for study and exam prep. Users do not need to register or log in to use the site.
Libretexts
The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society.

Mason OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder performs a simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials. It searches well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, and MERLOT, but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive, and NYPL Digital Collections. Because it is a real-time, federated search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated content. Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.

Milne Open Textbooks (SUNY--Geneso)
Noba Project
Requires the creation of an account
Open Sourced Textbooks
Make a difference in your students' lives with free, openly-licensed textbooks
Open Stacks (Rice University)
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 Textbook Library
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.

Welcome to Pressbooks Directory

Online Text Search

About On Line Books
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.
New Additions to Online Books
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
On Line Books Search
Search by author or title.
Online Books Subject Search
We now provide two ways to browse online books by subject. You can either browse by subject term, or by call number,
The Open Access Book of the Week [No Shelf Required]
Open Texts
Opening the world of digitised texts

Legal Sites to Read and Download Literature

Efforts to archive the web

The "Wayback" Machine
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.
eBooks & Texts--Internet Archive
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.
Internet Archive
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.
Open Library
UK Web Archives
The UK Web Archive (UKWA) collects millions of websites each year, preserving them for future generations. Use this site to discover old or obsolete versions of UK websites, search the text of the websites and browse websites curated on different topics and themes.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

American Archive of Public Media
A collaboration of the Library of Congress and WGBH (Boston)

Discover historic programs of publicly funded radio and television across America. Watch and listen.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg Information
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.
Project Gutenberg Search
You can search by author, title, subject, and language. You can also search the latest and the most popular.
Recently added to Project Gutenberg

Open Source Search

Directory of Open Access Journals
The General Index (Internet Archive)
Google Scholar
Search for articles.
Internet Archive Joins IDS Project for Interlibrary Loan
July 27, 2021
Internet Archive Scholar
This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals though the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
JournalTOCs
JURN
Search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses.
Open Library of Humanities

Privacy

Digital Privacy & Technology Guide: Home
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 Very Short Introduction

EBSCO eBooks
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 170 titles available.

Writers and Collections

Audiobooks

LibriVox
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:
Loyal Books
Public Domain audio books and eBooks.

Open Source Images

Looking for Images that Reflect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion? Ask the Community

Articles of Interest

After HarperCollins Acquisition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Library E-book Terms to Change
July 7, 2021
Beyond Social Media: The Full Context of Section 230
August 27, 2021
Can Publishers Maintain Control of the Scholarly Record?
January 5, 2021
COVID-19 and Publishing
January 25, 2021
Creating Value with Open Access Books
February 12, 2021
Does the rising tide of OER lift all boats?
March 7, 2022
eBooks at MCC libguide
Faculty Awareness of OER Has Increased for 5 Years Straight, Yet Adoption Is Flat
March 19, 2021
Feasibility, Sustainability, and the Subscribe-to-Open Model
April 20, 2021
How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary
December 2, 2020
How to Borrow and Read Ebooks From Your Library
How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.
July 2, 2021
Independent Publisher Drives Innovation, Sells eBooks to Internet Archive
March 2, 2022
Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers
October 28, 2021
Internet Archive Participates in DOAJ-Led Collaboration to Improve the Preservation of OA Journals
November 5, 2020
The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”
Open access publishing has, indeed, made academic research more accessible, but in “the move from physical academic journals to digitally-accessible papers,” Samantha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more precarious to preserve…. If an institution stops paying for web hosting or changes servers, the research within could disappear.” At least a couple hundred open access journals vanished in this way between 2000 and 2019, a new study published on arxiv found. Another 900 journals are in danger of meeting the same fate.
Is it time to revise the Open Source Definition?
Recent developments may strengthen the case for exploring improvements to the OSD
Kyle Hiebert: In the COVID-19 world, open source textbooks are the way of the future
The Library Technology Market’s Failure to Support Controlled Digital Lending
October 25, 2021
Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all
August 6, 2021
MIT Press Opens Full List of 2022 Monographs via Direct to Open
July 13, 2022
MIT Press to Release Many Spring Titles Open Access
December 14, 2021
Nature family of journals inks first open-access deal with an institution
October 20, 2020
New podcast on how digital culture and education intersect with copyright
September 7, 2021 Link to the podcast in the article.
Open Access Publishing : What is Open Access?
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.
OTN All-Access Working Group
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
The Rotting Internet (The Atlantic)
July 2021
Seeking Sustainability: Publishing Models for an Open Access Age
Strategies for integrating Open Access Resources (OAR) into libraries collections: A study
Subscribe to Open: The Why, The How and The What Now?! (Scholarly Kitchen)
December 8, 2020
Sustainable Open Access – What’s Next?
Technology has ended ownership but can now reinvent it
July 15, 2021
Understanding Open Educational Resources
The West already monopolized scientific publishing. Covid made it worse.
January 25, 2022
What are Open Educational Resources and how do they fit into the growing landscape of Open Access scholarly materials?
November 1, 2021
What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work?
June 18, 2021
What is an Open Source Evangelist?
January 8, 2021
Why Informal Information Sharing is Holding Your Organization Back
April 24, 2021
Why publish books open access?
October 23, 2020

WorldCat

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

No cost videos

Documentary Storm
Sign up for free newsletter updates.
Top Documentary Films

You can find many documentary films through a video search using your library account.

There are also movies at no cost from many web services including YouTube. I am not listing them since many ask you to sign up for an account.

Internet Classics Archive

Internet Classics Archive
Select from 441 Greek and Roman works in English translation.

History of eBooks

eBooks vs Printed Books: Which are better?
July 17, 2021
The Ebook Turns 50
July 4, 2021
Revisiting: Theory of the E-book
September 7, 2021

No Cost Online Courses

1,500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
December 16, 2020

Access to library resources from off-campus

You can watch videos, access articles and eBooks from off-campus but students may be asked for their A number and library password. Faculty and staff will be asked for their user name and library password.

Contact Us

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Open Source Literature: Home

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