OER and No Cost Resources: Home

Within this guide, you will find a definition of Open Access and Open Educational Resources, as well as recommended links to

• Open Access Books
• OER/Textbooks and Courses

and recommendations for linking to supplementary content material using

• Library Resources

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.  SPARC defines Open Access as:

• Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment" (https://sparcopen.org/open-access/).

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, and a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, briefly defines open access as:

• Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
• OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance.
• There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories. (http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm)

See also our full guide on all kinds of open resources at the link below.

Our MCC Librarians are here to help you discover appropriate sources of OER or Open Access materials for your online and face to face courses.  Consult with your department library liaison listed below.  Another great resource for help with adopting and adapting open resources as course content is the Center for Teaching and Learning!

Austin Community College's Library Services provides a very thorough guide on Open Educational Resources at the link below.