LibGuides: Open Access &amp; Faculty Scholarship: Open Educational Resources

Open and Affordable Educational Resources

The University of Richmond is committed to access and affordability for all students. Faculty can contribute to this goal by reducing the costs of textbooks and other educational materials. The UR Libraries offer support for making library-licensed e-resources available to your students and with helping you discover and use your own open educational resources.

There are several ways to make educational resources affordable for your students:

Work with your liaison librarian to purchase multi-use e-books for your class readings (free access to students).
Provide permalinks to journal articles and other resources on your Blackboard site or Library E-Reserves (free access to students).
Place a copy of your textbook on reserve in the library.

University Libraries Textbook Resource Guide
by Alissa Potter Last Updated Feb 5, 2024 136 views this year

Open Textbooks & Open Educational Resources

College Open Textbooks
A collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, focusing on the adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges.
Creative Commons Open Education Resources Wiki
Find OER Resources by Discipline
Suggestions from Virginia Tech Libraries on finding OER resources by discipline.
George Mason OER Metafinder Search
A one-stop searchbox for Open and Affordable Educational Resources.
Google Search for Open Textbooks
Conduct a Google search for topic and "open textbook". Use Google Advanced Search to filter by rights.
Merlot
MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
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 57 different sources and contains 159,459 records. Developed and supported by SUNY (State University of New York).
OCW Consortium
The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.
OER Commons
A repository of open educational resources representing a variety of disciplines.
OpenStax College
OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course.
Open Textbook Library
Peer-reviewed open textbooks from the University of Minnesota, Virginia Tech, and other public institutions.
Project Gutenberg
One of the original online text projects, "where you can download over 30,000 free ebooks to read on your PC, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone or other device."
Teaching Commons
OER Resources from Leading Colleges and Universities
Textopian
A tool for collaboration and annotation on public domain texts from Project Gutenberg.
Virginia OER Adoptions Hub
The Academic Library Consortium of Virginia's (VIVA) list of Collections of Open Educational Resources (OER) and/or openly licensed resources adopted by instructors for courses at Virginia higher education institutions. Institutional course alignment tags are assigned to the OER to outline the course(s) associated with the adoption.
VIVA Faculty Textbook Portal
A tool designed for public institutions in Virginia to locate OER and e-books, but anyone can search this database for OER. ***After you search, click on "OER Only" on the left.***
WAC Clearinghouse (Writing Across the Curriculum)
The Clearinghouse publishes articles and books of interest to the writing-across-the-curriculum community,and provides a wide range of Web-based resources for instructors who wish to use writing in their courses.

Boatwright Memorial Library

Open Access & Faculty Scholarship

Open and Affordable Educational Resources

Open Textbooks & Open Educational Resources