It may feel daunting to start finding OER. The following provides guidance on how to search for OER textbooks.

Best Bets: Repositories

It is useful to browse through the most high-quality OER repositories first. It is helpful to note that many of these tools aggregate OER from other repositories — and therefore, you many find some of the same resources in each repository.

General Education Level Courses

The following are the best starting points for introductory-level course textbooks:

• Open Textbook Library – a large collection of openly licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks in all subject areas
• Pressbooks Directory-a listing of OER created with Pressbooks
• LibreTexts – open textbooks built by faculty, students, and outside experts

More Niche Courses

While these also include introductory material in some cases, the following are the best starting points for upper-level courses:

• Open SUNY Textbooks-open textbooks created by SUNY faculty in a variety of subject areas
• Directory of Open Access Books – aggregator of open access books in a wide range of subject areas. Be sure to check for a Creative Commons license.
• HathiTrust Digital Library (use IU login as member institution) – digital access to thousands of titles held in academic libraries. Many of these works are in the public domain, so they may not have a CC license but are still free to use in your course materials.

Broad Search

If you want to be more exhaustive, consider using OASIS from SUNY. OASIS is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier by searching multiple sources for OER and other open content at once. It’s a search engine for OER! Whenever possible, try to utilize disciplinary language (i.e., “oncology” in addition to “cancer”). Beware that this method can be overwhelming as it searches a lot of sources at once.

• OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search) – searches open content from 114 different sources

References/ Additional Resources

• How to Find and Evaluate OER by Abbey Elder
• “Finding OER” by Amanda Larson, slides on YouTube and CC image searches are especially useful