Open textbooks are digital first academic textbooks published with an open licence. The open licence allows them to be freely accessible for anyone to read and download. This means the textbooks can be accessed at university and beyond. Open textbooks are written by scholarly authors and are available in a variety of subject areas.
If you are a student, you can use open textbooks to develop your knowledge of a topic. Open textbooks are free for you to use. They usually have no limits to how much content can be used and downloaded for offline study and you can create PDFs for use in screen reading software.
If you are an academic, you can include open textbooks in your reading lists, as long as you provide reference to the creator and the open licence. For some open textbooks it is also possible to modify and adapt the contents to your teaching.
To find out what open textbooks are available you can search some of the directories and publishing platforms such as the Open Textbook Library and Pressbooks. You can also look on the Library Search using a keyword, filtering your search to ‘Open Access’ and ‘eBook Full Text Online’.
You can learn more about Brunel’s work on open textbooks, as well as find additional recommendations for finding and using textbooks, on our Open Textbooks webpage and our Open Educational Resources for Teaching and Learning LibGuide.
