The high, and ever-increasing, cost of course materials is naturally a concern for both students and parents. The costs of these materials can place students at both academic and financial risk. In order to address this problem, there is a growing movement to incorporate affordable, or free, educational resources into courses that can serve as alternatives to cost-prohibitive academic materials. Faculty who are interested in addressing this problem can do a number of things:
Use content from other open access repositories. The Directory of Open Access Repositories provides a useful directory of repositories that host open publications.
The following websites are useful resources for finding open access materials:
Unpaywall is a service that aggregates content from scores of open access resources (journals, websites, institutional and disciplinary repositories) in order to provide access to open versions of scholarly materials that are behind paywalls. Unpaywall comes in the form of both a website as well as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox.
The Open Access Button searches databases to find open access versions of scholarly articles.
The Open Textbook Library is a library of textbooks that can be freely used and modified.
If you'd like more information on open access, open educational resources, or other matters related to scholarly publishing, please schedule a consultation:
