Open Educational Resources (OER) are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others."* This means, OER are free of most copyright restrictions, and as such are ideal for use in online teaching. OER May include full textbooks, or other tools such as streaming media, images, open access publications, and more.

OER allow:

• Retain -- users have the right to make, archive, and own copies of the content
• Reuse -- content can be reused in its unaltered form
• Revise -- content can be adapted, adjusted, modified, and altered
• Remix -- original or revised content can be combined with other content to create something new
• Redistribute -- copies of the content can be shared with others in its original, revised or remixed form.**

* From: https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational-resources/

** From: http://opencontent.org/definition/

Where to Find Open Textbooks

OER are often developed by faculty, peer reviewed by faculty, and made available openly online, or available for print. You may find full OER textbooks through:

OpenStax (Rice University)

Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota)

Where to find other types of OER

There are a growing number of repositories available, in which, OER can be found. For class-specific support, please contact your subject librarian, or the Office of Digital Scholarship and Communications: disc@vanderbilt.edu.

OER Repositories:

OER Commons: An online community and digital library where educators can identify, share, create open resources and open educational practices

MERLOT: 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

BC Campus: Canadian organization dedicated to curating high-quality OER and providing tools for authors to create Open Content

Other Openly Licensed Materials:

• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

  All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.
• E-Book Friendly

  Twenty-five sources of free public domain books.
• HathiTrust Digital Library

  HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
• Internet Archive

  Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Project Gutenberg

  Project Gutenberg offers over 59,000 free eBooks. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
• The Public Domain Review

  Founded in 2011, the PDR is an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.
• Vanderbilt University's Institutional Repository (VUIR)

  The Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository (VUIR) provides open access to faculty scholarly work, preserves historically significant digital materials, and supports the university in scholarly communications and the dissemination of knowledge.
• Search Creative Commons

  Search for free content in the public domain and under Creative Commons licenses.
• Open Textbook Library

  Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed