Open Chemistry Education Resources : Where to find OER

OpenStax College is an initiative of OpenStax, a non-profit at Rice University. It creates peer-reviewed, open textbooks available in printed (available for purchase through Amazon) and digital formats. The project was initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation, and the Maxfield Foundation. All textbooks use a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, which requires only attribution for use.

The Chemistry LibreTexts library is part of the LibreText project. LibreTexts are "textbooks" created by individual instructors or schools. The LibreText site contains materials such as homework exercises, worksheets, case studies, visualizations, and experiments that instructors can use under a CC BY-NC-SA license.

The Center for Open Education at the University of Minnesota supports three initiatives to support its vision of open education: a library of openly licensed textbooks, a network of higher education institutions committed to promoting open textbooks, and support for research fellows. The Open Textbook Library contains links to textbooks on many subjects. All textbooks are free to use, adapt and distribute and can be downloaded for free or printed inexpensively. Many textbooks are reviewed by subject matter experts to determine the textbook's comprehensiveness, accuracy, longevity, clarity, consistency, modularity, organization, interface, grammatical errors, and cultural relevance.

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open educational resources contributed from an international community. Resources include web sources, PDFs, video, and images and are evaluted for their content quality, effectiveness, and ease of use. MERLOT was originally developed by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. Users must create a free account to access materials.

OER Commons is an online community for curriculum experts and educators to discover and collaborate on the use, evaluation, and improvement of open educational resources. The online library of open educational resources was funded in 2007 with a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OER Commons curates a collection of teaching materials, strategies, and curricula submitted by educators. The collection includes materials for all grade levels (primary through post-secondary).

The College Open Textbooks Collaborative was funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as a collection of colleges, governmental agencies, educational nonprofits, and other education-related organizations. Created to provide support to community colleges, the Collaborative includes member organizations such as OER Commons, Open Education Resources Center for California, and OpenStax. Open Textbooks are peer reviewed, with a focus on appropriateness for community colleges.