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Open Educational Resources

A guide to textbooks, course materials and multimedia which are free or or low cost for educational use. These resources were created with the intention of being widely used and are legal to use in courses with proper citation.

Open English/ Literature Textbooks

Writing Commons

Writing Commons is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, Open Text for students and faculty in college-level courses that require writing and research.  Writing Commons has been adopted by Georgia Institute of Technology, University of South Florida-Tampa,  Ohio State University, and Duke University. 

Editor:

Joe Moxley, Ph.D. , University of South Florida

Most pages are published under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license, but a few are published under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

      

 

 

Research Writing in a Persuasive Mode  -Utah State University

Critical reading, and persuasive research writing techniques are addressed in this complete list of courseware. This material intended to span a 16 week course includes online readings and assignment directives. Critical reading, and persuasive research writing techniques are addressed by this material through a multiple draft writing process. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

 

English Composition I  -Saylor

This course promotes clear and effective communication skills through use of the Pre-Write, Write, and Revise method. The remaining units will focus on the minutiae of good writing practices, from style to citation methodology.  -Saylor

Authors:

Carolyn Tedholm

Carolyn Savoldy

Content on Saylor.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

 

 Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg serves digital versions of a variety of books including fiction, non-fiction, classic, law, and technical.

The Gutenberg Project serves only books whose copyright has expired or has been released for unlimited non-commercial use. 

 

 

The Public Domain Review

The Public Domain Review is an online journal an not-for-profit project dedicated to promoting and celebrating the public domain in all its richness and variety. All works eventually fall out of copyright - from classics works of art to absentminded doodles - and in doing so they enter the public domain . . . Our aim is to help readers explore this rich terrain - like a small exhibition gallery at the entrance to an immense network of archives and storage rooms that lie beyond.  -The Public Domain Review

All material featured in The Public Domain Review is in the Public Domain or openly licensed.

 

Digital Publlic Library of America 

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.  -DPLA

Directors:

Catherine Casserly, CEO, Creative Commons

Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan

Carl H. Pforzheimer, Professor and Librarian, Harvard University

Laura DeBonis, Former Director of Library Partnerships for Google Book Search

The copyright status of items in the DPLA varies. Many items are in the public domain. For individual rights information, please check the Rights field in the metadata or follow the link to the digital object on the content provider’s website for more information.