An open textbook is a textbook that is licensed under an open license and made available online for free use by students, teachers, and the general public.

Definition

An open textbook can be freely accessed. They are typically distributed in different media formats (print, e-books, audio formats, software etc).

What rights do I have?

Open textbooks have an open license that allow the public to freely use the material. Depending on the license you can share it with your students, adapt it to better suit your context, translate it, or combine it with other materials.

Most open textbooks are shared in the public domain, but can also be shared under an open license, these include:

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC BY-SA)
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (CC BY-NC-SA)
GNU Free Documentation License
Materials in the public domain, marked with CC0 or the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark

Affordable education

By sharing our material as open textbooks we make education accessible for more people, and reduce the cost of education, which benefits both students and teachers all over the world.

Creating OER

BC campus shares how to Create Open textbooks