Open College Books

Downloadable Resources for Developing Universities

In many parts of the world, academic books are not adequately available, and almost everywhere they are very expensive.  Fortunately, the Internet contains many open-access texts created by university professors, nonprofit groups, or governments, with useful information in the sciences, the humanities, and medicine. These books can be downloaded for free by anyone and most of them can be printed out for free. I have compiled a list of some of these sources. If you need a book but can't find it here, try the excellent Open Textbook Library of the University of Minnesota's Center for Open Education. Also try FreeTechBooks and Rice University's OpenStax. . I have also included some links to related educational resources such as educational videos and online courses, as long as they are free of charge. There are also some lists to subject collections of open-access articles at Cold Spring Harbor's Perspectives in Medicine.

My name is John J. Dziak. I currently am working as a researcher at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. I formerly was an associate research professor in statistics at the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center at the College of Health and Human Development of the Pennsylvania State University. I am maintaining this site as a volunteer -- as a caveat, I do not have any expertise in most of these subjects, and do not claim endorsement by my current or previous employers.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Response

(see also OpenWHO platform)

Agriculture and Food Science

English

Engineering and Computers

Mathematics

(See also AIMOnline Textbooks Initiative)

Medicine

New: World Health Organization (2022) Pocket Book of Primary Healthcare for Children and Adolescents in English, Ukrainian and Russian

Natural Science

Social Issues

Social Sciences

Other Directories of Open-access Texts and Textbooks:

Instructional Videos and Online Courses

Further information and disclaimer:

I cannot evaluate the resources in the article, but they may be useful. I have tried to include only resources with useful information from respectable sources. However, this is only a directory and I cannot endorse or take responsibility for all the contents of all the sources. Occasionally I might not agree with all of the opinions or recommendations in a book, and most often I do not have the expertise to determine whether a book is accurate. As always, it is important to use multiple sources and your own common sense. Documents marked as (CC) are under some kind of Creative Commons license, which usually means they can be freely distributed under reasonable conditions (like not changing them or taking personal credit for them). Some other documents, such as those from Hesperian Health Guides, do not have this license, so you can use them personally but should ask for permission before redistributing them, in order to respect copyright. If you have suggestions or concerns please email me at dziakj1@gmail.com  or jjd264@psu.edu. This site is dedicated in memory of Dr. Robert Franz. Special thanks to Valerie Walker at Global Medical Libraries for her help and encouragement.