Open educational resources (OER), open access and open learning has revolutionised the concept of education. To applaud the efforts put together by different individuals and organisation to facilitate open resources and their access this platform provides gateways to the various resources that students and lecturers can make use of to continue learning and building knowledge even without their and our physical presence.
These materials are freely available and can be downloaded, edited, and shared for the betterment of the academic embodiment because OER are not confined to the same copyright restrictions as materials from traditional publishing companies. Lecturers can modify OERs to personalise lesson plans and make sure students receive the most current and accurate information available without waiting for an updated textbook.
The list resources collated on this platform is not exhaustive but just highlights some materials that one can make use of. Because building this collection is not an individual initiative, if you as a reader come across material you think might be of help to others feel free to contact the librarian so the link can be added as well as comments and other suggestions.
This is a collection of thousands of e-books covering many areas and is freely available to the African population and as such each user of this database is required to register for access.
An online library collection with a stock of over 3000 books, journals and digital materials on African policy issues. The entire repository is open access and allows for free full-text downloading.
This platform offers vast array of titles in digital format with an objective of providing quality and fast services for downloading and reading.
Freebookcentre.net contains links to thousands of free online technical books in Computer Science, Electronics, Sciences, Medicine and many more. These books can either be downloaded or viewed online.
Free technical books in computers, mathematics plus the lecture notes.
This is a database that hosts an e-book collection covering subject fields like as Science and Technology, Law, Arts and Social Sciences.
Programming languages such as Ada, Assembly, Basic, C, C#, C++, CGI, JavaScript, Perl, Delphi, Pascal, Haskell, Java, Lisp, PHP, Prolog, Python and Ruby as well as game programming, and software engineering are available for free download and online reading.
This site lists free online Computer Science, Engineering and Programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.
Hosts a multidisciplinary collection of electronic books collected from various international publishers and libraries available as both full texts and excerpts.
A multidisciplinary database of e-books traversing the fields of Sciences, Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
This is an Open Access database comprising of peer reviewed e-books in the disciplines of Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LAW LIBRARIES (IALL)
IALL is a worldwide, cooperative non-profit organization of librarians, libraries and other persons and institutions concerned with the acquisition, dissemination and use of legal information from sources other than their own jurisdictions, representing all types and sizes of legal collections from academic law libraries to corporate libraries, from national and parliamentary libraries to administrative agency and court libraries.
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT RESOURCE CENTRE
This site hosts a freely available collection of over 200 books on global and regional issues related to sustainable and equitable development.
The Internet Archive is a digital library of and other cultural artefacts in digital form. Like a paper library, the Internet Archive is a compendium of Internet sites with free access for researchers, historians, scholars and the general public and covers all areas of academic research including the Arts, Social Sciences, Business Studies and Science and Technology.
IPL hosts several e-book titles in the Arts, Science and Technology, Social Sciences and the Humanities.
This site searches the contents of more than 700 web sites including gutenberg.org, wikibooks.org and archive.org finding all sorts of free books from public domain texts, open books, free audio books and ad-supported books.
This is a database of freely available e-books that cover a vast array of disciplines like the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
O'Reilly Open Books provides access to e-Books concentrating in Computer Science and Information and Communication Technologies.
OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across Europe.
This is a collection of more than a million e-book title that are freely accessed over the internet. It covers all major academic disciplines such as Social Sciences and Humanities, Science and Technology and the Arts.
Provides access to e-Books in various disciplines such as The Arts, Social Sciences, Commerce and Social Sciences
The Open Book Project seeks to encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics.
Open Edition Books is a web platform for books in the humanities and social sciences. More than half of them are available in Open Access. Additional services are available through subscribing libraries and institutions.
Baen Books is making available for free a number of its titles in electronic format. Baen covers Literature, History, Philosophy, Religion and the Arts.
CHRISTIAN CLASSICS ETHEREAL LIBRARY
This is a digital library of classic Christian books in electronic format. It provides full text access to many book titles centering on the Christian religion.
Digital Book Index provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. It contains books on Reference works, Social Sciences, Literature and Linguistics, History and the Arts.
A collection of e-books covering different subject fields.
The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in Science, Engineering, and Health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in Science and Health Policy.
HUMAN SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL PUBLICATIONS
The core business of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) is to conduct large-scale, policy-relevant, social-scientific projects for public-sector users, non-governmental organisations and international development agencies. It published books centred on human and infrastructure development. The HSRC is committed to cutting-edge research that supports development nationally, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Africa. Our commitment to the dissemination of that research demonstrates the remarkable and measurable impact of our work.
This is an innovative online library aimed at improving the quality of healthcare in humanitarian action, worldwide. MEDBOX provides access to professional guidelines, textbooks and practical documents on health action available online and brings these into the hands of humanitarian aid workers and medical practitioners.
OER repositories
- http://www.gutenberg.org/
- https://www.oercommons.org/
- https://www.oerafrica.org/
- https://archive.org/index.php
- https://www.jisc.ac.uk/libraries-and-research
- https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
- https://www.iskme.org/
- http://www.osrportal.eu/
- https://www.europeana.eu/en
- https://www.pediatricneurologybriefs.com/
- https://www.hathitrust.org/
- https://www.jisc.ac.uk/website/legacy/intute
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books
- https://eifl.net
Other useful links to aid in your studies:
- e-Resources
- To access these “USEFUL LINKS” log in to the e-Resources platform and scroll down to the bottom of the page.