Open Access eBooks
Brill eBooks(external link)
Brill is an international academic publisher that specialises in humanities, social sciences, law and ecclesiology.
Directory of Open Access Books(external link)
DOAB facilitates free access to peer reviewed open books from reputed publishers. While majority of books are fully downloadable, only certain chapters are allowed in a few.
MDPI eBooks(external link)
MDPI, one of the leading open access publishers, has a collection of more than 3500 books. Most of their books are collections of articles from journals published by MDPI.
National Academic Press Open(external link)
The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine of USA, and provides free access to more than 10,000 books.
OASIS(external link)
Being a search tool for open access resources, Oasis brings together open access books listed under different directories at one place. As Oasis search all types of OA materials, users have to limit their results to three categories, namely Open access books, text books, and public domain books, listed under ‘types’ at the top left-hand side of the results page to get only book results. Subject, title and author wise search is available.
OER Commons- Open Textbooks(external link)
A collection of textbooks from different educational institutes are classified subject wise here.
Open Textbook Initiative(external link)
Provides access to books and journals published by institutions, mainly Australian Universities, which are members of this collective. The Australian National University(external link) has the largest collection of books.
Open Textbook Library(external link)
A collection of freely downloadable textbooks are available from this link.
Open Edition(external link)
Use the filters under the access policy, namely open access freemium and simple open access to get open access books. Freemium titles are not downloadable but are fully accessible for online reading. As majority of books are in languages other than English, it is good to use the language filter too. As some of the books here are listed in DOAB(external link) and OASIS(external link), some of the freemium titles may be available for full download in these platforms(external link)
Springer eBooks(external link)
Provides access to open access eBooks published by Springer under their different imprints, such as Springer Open, BioMedCentral, Nature portfolio, Palgrave MacMillan and Apress. While using advanced search, one needs to untick ‘include preview only content’ box and select the limiter books, to get only open access eBooks. Most of these books, except the latest ones, are accessible through DOAB.
Taylor and Francis eBooks(external link)
Taylor and Francis group, which includes imprints like Routledge, Dove Press, Cogent OA, has an eBook collection of more than 1100 titles. It covers subject areas ranging from Social sciences to STEM disciplines. While initiating a subject wise search, filter your results by ticking the open access box in the ‘filter by’ options at the left side of the page.
Wikibooks(external link)
An open text book collection by Wikimedia Foundation. Following the Wikipedia tradition, anyone can edit these books.
For relatively old books and public domain books see collections on this page
which includes links to Internet Archive(external link) and its library section called Open Library(external link)
