Scholarly Communication and Open Access: Books
All things open related to Scholarly Communication and Open Access content.
Open Access Books and Monographs
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
As stated on the doabooks.org site, the purpose of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): “is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.”
Open Book Aggregators
- Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN)Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) provides free, peer-reviewed, open access e-books (monographs), and edited volumes pertaining to the social sciences and the humanities found here. Further still, OAPEN uses various Creative Commons licenses to provide authors with the means to direct the usage and further dissemination of their works (i.e., attribution, third parties use, commercial use, and derivative works).
- Open Research LibraryThe Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This vital infrastructure is slated to comprise the most comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books accessible for everyone.
- Open Textbook LibraryThe Open Textbook Library is an online catalog of open textbooks based at the University of Minnesota Center for Open Education, including nearly 1000 textbooks across disciplines. Accepts only completed works available under open licenses, portable file formats, and "in use at multiple higher educational institutions, or affiliated with a higher education institution, scholarly society, or professional organization".
- Publishers of OA BooksA large list of Open Monograph Publishers, part of the Open Access Directory.
- WikibooksWikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Set up almost exactly as Wikipedia, the content is in various languages. There are over 37,000 books that can be viewed by subject. Books are in wiki format (see the example on Art History). Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation licensing is used. Print copies are not available.
Open Monograph Publishers
- MUSE OpenMuse Open is a publishing platform of open monographs under development by Project Muse and Johns Hopkins University Press, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation starting in April 2015 for a period of 9 months. Initial participants include "The University of Colorado, Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of North Carolina".
- Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN)Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) provides free, peer-reviewed, open access e-books (monographs), and edited volumes pertaining to the social sciences and the humanities found here. Further still, OAPEN uses various Creative Commons licenses to provide authors with the means to direct the usage and further dissemination of their works (i.e., attribution, third parties use, commercial use, and derivative works).
- Open Book PublishersOpen Book Publishers have nearly 200 titles available on a broad range of academic topics, many focused on humanities,
- Open Humanities PressAcademic books in the humanities.
- Punctum BooksPhilosophy, Classics, Art, History, Media & Technology, and more - Punctum is an experimental open access book publisher.
- Routledge Open AccessRoutledge initiative offering publication to research monographs. All books under this initiative are released under a CC-BY-NC-ND license upon publication, deposited in OAPEN, and made available on the Routledge/Taylor & Francis ebooks platform. Publications available as Routledge/Taylor & Frances ebook, PDF, and printed edition.
- SpringerLink OpenSpringerOpen have nearly 1,500 book titles in many fields with particular strength in STEM disciplines.
- Ubiquity PressUbiquity Press publishes open access peer-reviewed academic journals, books and data. All publications are under a CC BY license. Ubiquity Press maintain a list of funds for open access scholarly books.
Popular Collections
- The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offers more than 600 publications (noted September 2013) in electronic format that can be downloaded in a totally legal and free. In this collection of electronic books can find exhibition catalogs, books on research conducted at the museum or reference books on Art and Architecture in PDF format which you can download free.
- Project Gutenberg"Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. We carry high quality ebooks: All our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers."
- Internet Archive Ebook and Texts Archive"Download free books and texts. The Internet Archive Text Archive contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books."
- Open LibraryThe OpenLibrary is an interface to the published books on archive.org and links to other online book collections.
Tech Books
- Microsoft TechNet | msdn free ebooksA bookshelf of freely available ebooks to help you understand and use the current and next generation tools, technologies, and applications.
- O'Reilly Open BooksO'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years.
- InTech Open Access eBooks"InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Since 2004, InTech has collaborated with more than 85789 authors and published 2327 books and 7 journals with the aim of providing free online access to high-quality research and helping leading academics to make their work visible and accessible to diverse new audiences around the world."
- NASA e-booksFor those passionate about space, NASA e-books are focused on history, aeronautics, and space science. Books are available in various formats including PDF, ePUB and MOBI.
- FreeTechBooks"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."