Research Guides: How to Find Books: Open Access Ebooks

Finding Open Collections

Listed on this page are collections that offer Open Access books or journals, images and videos. Open access materials are freely accessible, but in some cases an account may be necessary to download the materials. Open Education Resources (OERs) are freely accessible and are open to be reused, adapted and/or shared.

Finding Open Access materials on the Davidson College Library website:

One way to find Open Access collections is through our A-Z Database list. Filter the Database Types to "Open Access".
Another option is through the library catalog, search your topic or subject term and filter the results with Availablity "Open Access" on the left hand side.
A third option is to browse the curated list below and link directly to the open collections and textbook options listed.

George Mason University OER Metafinder
The Mason OER Metafinder helps you find Open Educational Resources. Unlike other OER discovery sites with our Metafinder you aren’t searching a static database that we’ve built. Instead, the OER Metafinder launches a real-time, simultaneous search across 21 different sources of open educational materials as you hit the Search button. Because it is a real-time, federated search, it can take a bit longer than searches of pre-indexed, curated content; however, as compensation the results returned are absolutely up-to-the-minute for each search target. Additional results will continue to trickle in as the search continues running and you begin examining your results.
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A distinct feature of the Mason OER Metafinder is the scope of our discovery service. We’re searching well-known OER repositories like OpenStax, OER Commons, MERLOT but also sites like HathiTrust, DPLA, Internet Archive and NYPL Digital Collections where valuable but often overlooked yet often “open” educational materials may be found. Given the many “standards” of metadata in the OER universe, we can’t guarantee that every item retrieved is “Open” in the strictest interpretation of that term…so make it a practice to check the rights of any item you use.
LibreTexts Free the Textbook OER Finder
Includes a vast amount of Humanities OER titles. The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society. All Libretexts libraries are accessible to everyone via the internet, completely free. We believe everyone should have access to knowledge.
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LibreTexts is promoting assistive technologies across the entire platform.

NC DOCKS
NC DOCKS is a cooperative effort to make the scholarly output of the University of North Carolina System more available to the world. NC DOCKS includes many full text articles, audio recordings, dissertations, and other formats. All materials are indexed by Google and are freely available to scholars and researchers world-wide.

OASIS OER Finder
Openly Available Sources Integrated Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier. OASIS currently searches open content from 117 different sources and contains 388,707 records. OASIS is being developed at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library.
Open Library Ontario
Search our collection of open textbooks and other open resources. The curated collection aligns with top subject areas in post-secondary education and features reviews from experts and educators across Canada.

OpenUNC
The OpenUNC website highlights and advances open research practices, open access publication methods, open dissemination of research outputs, and open educational resources. The website brings together the information available open access produced by institutions in the UNC system and links out directly to the resources.
The website was created and is maintained by members of the University Library Advisory Council with the goal of helping open UNC research to the world.
Wellcome Open Research
Wellcome Open Research is an Open Research publishing platform that provides all Wellcome researchers with a place to rapidly publish any results they think are worth sharing. All articles benefit from rapid open access publication, transparent peer review and editorial guidance on making all source data openly available. Search in two ways, by Gateway that provide personalized portals for Wellcome Centres and Wellcome-funded projects to collate and showcase research. Search by Collections, compilations of content relating to a specific Wellcome-funded community, project or conference.

Open Ebook Collections

ACLS Humanities E-Book
Includes 60 open access titles. Books in the ACLS HEB collection have been recommended and reviewed by scholars and constituent learned societies of the American Council of Learned Societies. ACLS HEB is now hosted on the Fulcrum platform.
Brill Open Access
Browse over 650 open access ebook and journal titles. Free to download by article, chapter, or full book PDF. Brill’s Open Access content is made available on Brill.com, free of charge to the user and without registration required.

Digital Public Library of America
A portal to digital collections from American libraries, museums, and archives. Includes primary sources ranging from Exploration of the Americas to topics including Civil Rights and Women's Suffrage. Digital Exhibitions include stories of national significance drawn from source materials in libraries, archives, and museums across the United States.

DOAB-Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Generally speaking, all books listed in DOAB are free to read and share for non-commercial use. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
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All books listed in DOAB are freely accessible and therefore free to read, but this does not mean readers are free to do anything they like with these books. The usage rights of the books in DOAB are determined by the license. Please check the license if you want to re-use the contents of a book.
Getty Publications
More than 300 books to read and download for free. Topics span from Antiquities, conservation, Latin American art, Museum studies and more.

Humanities Commons CORE: Open Access for the Humanities
An open access repository for sharing, discovering, retrieving, and archiving digital work. CORE provides Humanities Commons members with a permanent, open access storage facility for their scholarly output, facilitating maximum discoverability and encouraging peer feedback.
The Humanities Commons network is open to anyone. Humanities Commons was designed by scholarly societies in the humanities to serve the needs of humanists as they engage in teaching and research that benefit the larger community. Humanities Commons is open-access, open-source, and nonprofit.

Internet Archive ebooks and texts
The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 1.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account. Patrons can choose a short-term access for 1 hour, or a longer 14-day loan.

JSTOR Open Access Ebooks
Books at JSTOR has also begun a pilot project led by the Latin American Research More than 6,500 Open Access ebooks from 90 publishers. Books at JSTOR has also begun a pilot project led by the Latin AmericanResources Project (LARRP) in collaboration with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), and Latin American bookseller García Cambeiro. Thanks to a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we’ve digitized more than 600 out-of-print books published by El Colegio de México and made them available on an Open Access basis on JSTOR.
The ebooks are also preserved in Portico, ensuring that they will be available to researchers in perpetuity.
Lever Press Open Access
Lever Press is grounded on a set of values, and guided by clear commitments. The values on which we’re basing our work are producing the highest quality scholarship in an economically sustainable model, embodying and reflecting the values of the liberal arts, and leading the way in establishing best practices for born-digital, peer reviewed, open access monograph publishing.
As a press aligned with the ethos and mission of liberal arts colleges, we seek out, identify, evaluate, and advocate for transformative scholarship that spurs creative dialogue within and between traditional fields of inquiry, emphasizes disciplinary innovation, draws upon new models of collaborative research, and strives to reach the broadest audience possible.
Lever Press titles are made available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses to maximize opportunities for reuse. The particular CC license chosen is up to the author.
Davidson College is a supporting institution of Lever Press.

Luminos- University of California Press
Luminos is University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared. Open Access offers the potential to exponentially increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by making it globally accessible and freely available in digital formats.
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University of California Press is one of the top publishers for the academic community. For more than 120 years, it has championed work that influences public discourse and challenges the status quo in multiple fields of study.

MIT Press Direct
Open access books are available on MIT Press Direct and new titles are added regularly. These titles are free to enjoy on the MIT Press Direct Platform and may be viewed and accessed through the MIT Press Direct search feature. The Press actively supports a variety of OA models for digital monographs, trade books, and textbooks, with an emphasis on being author-responsive. Whether or not a book is published OA in digital form has no bearing on how it is curated, peer reviewed, edited, designed, or marketed by the Press.
Simply search for any character by entering * in the search bar and selecting the filter for open access material to view a complete list.
OAPEN
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
Open Book Publishers
At Open Book Publishers we are changing the nature of the traditional academic book. Our peer reviewed books are published in hardback, paperback and ebook editions, but we also publish free online editions of every title in PDF, HTML and XML formats that can be read via our website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere. We are proud to say that our books are currently being accessed freely worldwide by over 20,000 readers each month.
OBP provides permanent and free access to our books for readers with no publication fees for the authors, and the majority of our titles are published under the most flexible reuse standard – the CC BY license. We make publication decisions based on academic merit rather than commercial considerations, and all our books undergo a rigorous peer review and editorial process.
Open Research Library
The Open Research Library (ORL). Users can browse and search for Open Access books from various publishers and providers, currently including all Knowledge Unlatched books. Library features Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books.

Project Gutenberg
A library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education. Most were published before 1924, with some published in the decades after.

Smarthistory
Smarthistory is a center for public art history with thousands of free videos and essays written by experts and reviewed through an open peer-review process where it is vetted by multiple scholars including those with applicable area expertise.
Smarthistory uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. A citation is provided at the bottom of every Smarthistory content page.

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota
The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is committed to producing a small number of high-quality publications in archaeology, the art of archaeology, North Dakota history, petroculture, and politics & current affairs. The Digital Press is also proud to partner with two journals to publish special supplements and volumes.
The volumes are published, as often as possible, as open access under various Creative Commons licenses.
Our publications are made available as free-to-download or low-cost paperbacks.
University of Calgary Press
Open access ebooks available on the the University of Calgary Press website. Subject specialties include Africa: Missing Voices; Arts; Cinema, Canada, Latin America & Caribbean Studies, among others.
University of Michigan Press
This collection includes 145 open access titles on topics in Asian studies, German studies, media studies, digital studies, among others.
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University of Michigan Press is a leading publisher and distributor of books and digital projects in the humanities and social sciences that are aligned with the strengths of its parent institution.
University of Minnesota Press
Known for its boundary breaking editorial program in the humanities and social sciences, the University of Minnesota Press has now developed Manifold, an innovative platform to publish and read open-access books online. If you want to get the most out of your experience, sign up for an account so you can highlight, annotate, and join in the conversations already happening in these projects.