From the shelves of Freel Library

post by Janet Lexow, Evening Reference Librarian

Of particular interest to students during Open Access week, Open Educational Resources (OER) are educational materials that reside in the public domain and include much more than academic journals and articles. There are thousands of OA books and course materials available that can be used for classroom textbooks, to supplement your academic studies, or to help reduce costs and financial barriers to your education. Listed below are just a small sample of the online sources that provide OER textbooks for you to use.

OpenStax provides OA academic textbooks in the fields of math, science, social sciences, humanities, business and more. The textbooks are written by experts in their fields and undergo rigorous peer review.  he content and subject matter of these books can easily fit into any related course of study.

Open Textbook Library provides a growing collection of more than 678 textbooks in subject areas including Accounting and Finance, Business, Computer Science and Information Systems, Economics, Education, Humanities, Journalism, Media Studies and Communications.

 From Yale University, Project Gutenberg may just be the resource you need if you are in a classical literature class or just want to enjoy reading a literary classic for fun. This online library holds more than 60,000 free ebooks with the focus on older works in which the U.S. copyright has expired.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The OER Commons provides access to thousands of OA materials and a library of more than 1,800 textbooks in the subject areas of Business and Communication, Career and Technical Education, English Language Arts, History (Ancient, United States and World), Law, Life Science, Mathematics, Physical Science and Social Science.

BCcampus OpenEd is a Canadian-based educational resource that provides OER materials designed to help in the learning experience of students. Their library collection includes 304 open textbooks spanning many disciplines.

post by Janet Lexow, Evening Reference Librarian

This week is recognized as International Open Access Week.  Open Access (OA) refers to the free and unrestricted online aaccess to research available in journals, journal articles and books.  In a world where access to all types of  scholarly information inn all subject fields is needed on a daily basis, having access to these types of resources is essential.

As a starting point or introduction to available open access materials that you may find  useful in your studies, two good resources include

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)    https://doaj.org   and the

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)    https://www.doabooks.org
 

The DOAJ is a database that contains approximately 12000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities.

The DOAB database contains 21,495 academic peer-reviewed books and chapters from 323 publishers.

Throughout the week we will be looking at some additional academic OA resources that may help you throughout your academic time of study.