LibGuides: Open Source Literature: Home

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 he Study of the Public Domain
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.
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.
Curationist
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
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.
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.
Directory of Open Access Journals
Find open access journals & articles.
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.
HathiTrust
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.
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.
Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education
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.
Knowledge Unlatched
LibreTexts Commons
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.
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.
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).
SPARC
Sharing knowledge is a human right.
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 Workfoce
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

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

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.
Democracy's Library (Internet Archive)
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!
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
What is Happening to The Internet Archive?
April 27, 2023

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.

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.
HathiTrust
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.
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
Jurn is a free online search tool for the finding and downloading of free full-text scholarly works.
Open Library of Humanities

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Americn Archive of Public Broadcasting
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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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 168 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.

Podcasts/Videos

Paywall: The Business Of Scholarship
May require a free account signup at the Internet Archive

Open Source Images

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

Articles of Interest

2020.04.07| Seeking Sustainability: Publishing Models for an Open Access Age
2020.04.22| Kyle Hiebert: In the COVID-19 world, open source textbooks are the way of the future
2020.08.27| Sustainable Open Access – What’s Next?
2020.09.22| The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”
2020.09.30| Is it time to revise the Open Source Definition?
2020.10.20| Nature family of journals inks first open-access deal with an institution
2020.10.23| Why publish books open access?
2020.11.05| Internet Archive Participates in DOAJ-Led Collaboration to Improve the Preservation of OA Journals
2020.12.02| How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary
2020.12.08| Subscribe to Open: The Why, The How and The What Now?! (Scholarly Kitchen)
2021.01.05| Can Publishers Maintain Control of the Scholarly Record?
2021.01.08| What is an Open Source Evangelist?
2021.01.25| COVID-19 and Publishing
2021.02.12| Creating Value with Open Access Books
2021.03.19| Faculty Awareness of OER Has Increased for 5 Years Straight, Yet Adoption Is Flat
2021.04.21| Feasibility, Sustainability, and the Subscribe-to-Open Model
2021.04.24| Why Informal Information Sharing is Holding Your Organization Back
2021.06.18| What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work?
2021.07.02| How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.
2021.07.15| Technology has ended ownership but can now reinvent it
2021.07.21| After HarperCollins Acquisition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Library E-book Terms to Change
2021.07| The Rotting Internet (The Atlantic)
2021.08.06| Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free to all
2021.08.27| Beyond Social Media: The Full Context of Section 230
2021.10.25| The Library Technology Market’s Failure to Support Controlled Digital Lending
2021.10.28| Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers
2021.11.01| What are Open Educational Resources and how do they fit into the growing landscape of Open Access scholarly materials?
2021.12.14| MIT Press to Release Many Spring Titles Open Access
2022.01.25| The West already monopolized scientific publishing. Covid made it worse.
2022.03.02| Independent Publisher Drives Innovation, Sells eBooks to Internet Archive
2022.03.07| Does the rising tide of OER lift all boats?
2022.07.13| MIT Press Opens Full List of 2022 Monographs via Direct to Open
2022.07.27| How to Borrow and Read Ebooks From Your Library
2022.10.05| Examining the technological and pedagogical elements of select open courseware
2022.10| White Paper: Improving Student Success Through the Use of Open Educational Resources
2022.11.15| Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books
2022.12.08| Column: Here’s why you can’t ‘own’ your ebooks
2023.03.14| The Publisher Playbook: A Brief History of the Publishing Industry’s Obstruction of the Library Mission
2023.03.20| Hachette v. Internet Archive: All Our Coverage
2023.03.28| Congress Introduces Bill to Tackle Textbook Costs
2023.03.30| When is a library not a library? When it’s online, apparently.
2023.04.06| Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research – And More than Ever
eBooks at MCC libguide
Open Access Publishing : What is Open Access?
[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.
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
Strategies for integrating Open Access Resources (OAR) into libraries collections: A study
Understanding Open Educational Resources

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

No Cost Online Courses

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

Children's Literature

Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
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.
Classic Children's Books via the Library of Congress
Turn the pages to explore bygone eras, time-honored tales and historical narratives. Adventure awaits in these classic books online.
International Children's Digital Library
The ICDL Foundation promotes tolerance and respect for diverse cultures by providing access to the best of children's literature from around the world.

Banned Books Available OnLine

Banned Book Club
Click the link for a new title.
Banned Books available through The Internet Archive
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.
The Banned & Challenged Books Library

Contact Us

Bedford Campus Reference Desk 781 280 3705 Lowell Campus Reference Desk 978 656 3005

Send us a text: 978 241 7884

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.

Rip Rybnikar

he/him/his

Email Me

Contact:

Virtual Reference: Evenings and Saturday

Open Source Literature: Home

Topics on this Page

Open Access Apps

Organizations that promote open source

Open Source Textbooks

Online Text Search

Legal Sites to Read and Download Literature

Efforts to archive the web

Project Gutenberg

Open Source Search

American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Privacy

A Very Short Introduction

Writers and Collections

Audiobooks

Podcasts/Videos

Open Source Images

Articles of Interest

WorldCat

No cost videos

Internet Classics Archive

History of eBooks

No Cost Online Courses

Children's Literature

Banned Books Available OnLine

Contact Us

Contact Us

Access to library resources from off-campus