Questions and discussions about open educational resources, free academic texts by subject, and building effective self-study programs from the LibreTxts community.
Posted by CommunityCollegeCalc · 44 replies
OpenStax Calculus (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) is the most widely adopted free calculus textbook, covering single-variable and multivariable calculus at a level appropriate for both community college and university courses. LibreTexts Mathematics also hosts several calculus collections that include worked examples, interactive elements, and instructor ancillaries. Paul's Online Math Notes (tutorial.math.lamar.edu) by Paul Dawkins of Lamar University provides thorough free calculus notes with many worked examples, though in note rather than textbook format. For practice problems, the Art of Problem Solving community and MIT OCW 18.01/18.02 course archives offer extensive problem sets at no cost.
Posted by InstructorDev · 38 replies
Pressbooks (pressbooks.com) is the leading platform for creating open textbooks, offering a WordPress-based interface that exports to PDF, EPUB, Web Book, and MOBI formats. It is used by numerous university OER programs and is open source for self-hosting. LibreTexts RemixStudio allows faculty to combine existing LibreTexts content with their own writing, creating customized textbooks that can be adopted by individual courses. Bookdown (bookdown.org) uses R Markdown to produce professional-quality HTML and PDF textbooks, popular in statistics and data science. Sphinx (used by the Python documentation community) and Jupyter Book are strong options for computational courses where code examples and interactivity are important features.
Posted by TextbookCosts · 51 replies
Research consistently shows that open textbooks save students substantial money. The average college student in the US spends between $1,200 and $1,500 per year on textbooks and course materials. Switching a single introductory course to an OpenStax textbook saves students $150-$300 compared to a typical commercial introductory textbook. Florida Virtual Campus surveys have documented cases where students skipped buying required textbooks due to cost, leading to poorer academic outcomes — open textbooks eliminate this access barrier. A 2018 report from the Student PIRG found that 65% of students had skipped buying a required textbook due to cost. Schools with broad OER adoption programs have measured thousands of dollars in cumulative savings per student over a four-year degree.
Posted by TerminologyCheck · 26 replies
Open access (OA) refers specifically to research outputs — journal articles, dissertations, and conference papers — made freely available online, often through mandates from funding agencies like NIH or NSF. Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials — textbooks, lesson plans, videos, simulations — that are openly licensed for educational use. Both movements share the goal of removing paywalls from knowledge, but they target different types of content and different audiences. A research professor might use OA journals to access current literature while assigning OER textbooks to students. Organizations like SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) advocate for both, recognizing their complementary roles in making higher education more affordable and equitable.
Posted by PhysicsUndergrad · 43 replies
OpenStax University Physics (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) provides a rigorous, calculus-based physics course covering mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, optics, and modern physics at a level comparable to Halliday, Resnick, and Krane. The text is peer-reviewed, includes a full solution manual for instructors, and the student edition is free online or available as a low-cost print-on-demand paperback. Light and Matter by Benjamin Crowell is another freely available calculus-based physics text with an emphasis on physical intuition and problem-solving. For theoretical physics beyond the introductory level, David Tong's Cambridge lecture notes (available freely at damtp.cam.ac.uk) cover classical mechanics, electrodynamics, statistical physics, and quantum field theory at a graduate level.
Posted by ResearchAccess · 55 replies
Several legitimate routes exist for accessing peer-reviewed journal articles without paying. PubMed Central (pubmedcentral.nih.gov) hosts millions of biomedical articles funded by NIH, all freely accessible. JSTOR's free access program allows reading of up to 100 articles per month after free registration. Many universities provide alumni access to library databases. Directly emailing corresponding authors requesting a copy of their paper works surprisingly often — most researchers are happy to share their work. Unpaywall (unpaywall.org) is a browser extension that automatically finds legal free versions (author manuscripts, preprints) when you encounter a paywall. SSRN for social sciences and arXiv for physics, math, and computer science host preprint versions of most research papers before formal journal publication.
Posted by EconStudent · 35 replies
OpenStax Principles of Economics, Principles of Microeconomics, and Principles of Macroeconomics are the standard free alternatives for introductory economics, used at hundreds of institutions and available free online or as low-cost print editions. The Economy (core-econ.org) is a free, modern introductory economics text developed by an international team that integrates inequality, sustainability, and behavioral economics alongside traditional coverage. MIT OpenCourseWare 14.01 and 14.02 provide lecture notes, problem sets, and exams from MIT's introductory courses. For development economics, The World Bank and IMF publish many educational working papers and primers freely. Khan Academy's economics coverage is excellent for foundational concepts and is useful as a supplement to any of these primary texts.
Posted by CitationHelp · 29 replies
Open textbooks are cited like any other book or web resource, with the addition of the URL and license information. In APA 7th edition: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of work: Capital letter also for subtitle (edition, if applicable). Publisher. URL. For example: OpenStax College. (2021). University Physics Volume 1 (2nd ed.). OpenStax. https://openstax.org/details/books/university-physics-volume-1. In MLA 9th edition, include the URL and date accessed. The Purdue OWL (owl.purdue.edu) provides comprehensive current citation guides for both formats. Many open textbook platforms like OpenStax include a pre-formatted citation on each book's landing page that you can copy directly into your bibliography.
Posted by CanadianOER · 32 replies
BCcampus Open Education is a British Columbia government-funded initiative that supports the development and adoption of open educational resources across BC's public post-secondary institutions. It operates the BC Open Textbook Collection, which hosts over 300 peer-reviewed open textbooks covering courses commonly taken in BC's colleges and universities. BCcampus provides grants to faculty to adopt, adapt, and create OER, and publishes the Pressbooks Guide and other resources to help instructors with open publishing. Their peer review system uses subject-matter expert faculty reviewers who assess textbooks for accuracy, comprehensiveness, and pedagogical effectiveness, providing quality ratings that help other instructors make adoption decisions. The initiative has saved BC students over $25 million in textbook costs since its launch.
Posted by AccreditationQuestion · 47 replies
Yes, open textbooks are used in accredited degree programs at thousands of institutions worldwide, including community colleges, state universities, and research universities. Accreditation agencies evaluate programs based on learning outcomes, faculty qualifications, and institutional resources — not on whether textbooks are commercial or open. OpenStax reports over 4,800 institutions using its textbooks. Several universities have launched "Z-degree" (zero-textbook-cost degree) programs where all required materials for completing a full degree are freely available. Community colleges in particular have been leaders in OER adoption, with entire degree pathways built around free open textbooks in fields from nursing to business administration. The quality of open textbooks, not their price, determines their suitability for accredited use.
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