Open Source Literature: Home

Learn the basics of the Open eBooks app

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Directory of Open Access Books is a joint service of OAPEN, OpenEdition, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université

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.

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.

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.

Open access journals and books from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

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.

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.

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

Open Syllabus is a non-profit research organization that collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support novel teaching and learning applications.

2020 with background

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Search for articles.

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.

Search millions of free academic articles, chapters and theses.

Open access journals and books from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

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.

November 30, 2020

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.

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January 5, 2021

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November 5, 2020

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.

Recent developments may strengthen the case for exploring improvements to the OSD

October 20, 2020

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

December 8, 2020

January 8, 2021

October 23, 2020

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

Select from 441 Greek and Roman works in English translation.

December 16, 2020