Subject Guides
Open Educational Resources (OER)
This guide provides details about how the open access movement is impacting academic education and how to find appropriate low cost or zero cost materials for academic courses.
Showcase your Open Book
The Open Repository @Binghamton (The ORB) provides book gallery structures for showcasing works created by Binghamton 
University faculty, staff, and students.
If you want to learn more about sharing your scholarly or creative works contact ORB@binghamton.edu
Creating Open Content
Creating an online educational resource can be as easy as typing text into a document and attaching appropriate credit for other people’s shared work. Once you have your content, find the digital publishing platform that works best for you (refer to the suggestions below). Once the work is complete, go through Creative Commons Licensing to set guidelines for how you plan to share your work and then select an appropriate platform. There are many sites that house open textbooks such as MERLOT II, OER Commons, Open Textbook Library, or OpenStax.
Another option is to use the Digital Commons Book Publishing tools located through The ORB. For an example of a digital collection, see Portland State University
Creative Commons
Creative Commons provides creators with the ability to share their works with others, while still having some control of how their created materials are used and recognized.
Attaining a Creative Commons license protects your work and acknowledges how you would like others to share and use your work.
Taken from creativecommons.org "Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright."
| Attribution You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit. |
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| Noncommercial You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only. |
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| No Derivative Works You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. |
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| Share Alike You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. |
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| Public Domain Dedication (CC0) You, the copyright holder, waive your interest in your work and place the work as completely as possible in the public domain so others may freely exploit and use the work without restriction under copyright or database law. |
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| Public Domain Work Works, or aspects of copyrighted works, which copyright law does not protect. Typically, works become part of the public domain because their term of protection under copyright law expired, the owner failed to follow certain required formalities, or the works are not eligible for copyright protection. |
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Attaining a Creative Commons License
For those who wish to create or share their own OER visit the Creative Commons Choose License page.
This will provide guidance for how to select the right protections and labeling for your open content,
Using & Attributing Open Content
How to Provide Appropriate Attribution to Materials Licensed through Creative Commons
- Creative Commons' Best Practices for Attribution
- How to Attribute Creative Commons Photos
- Open Attribution Builder (Open Washington)
Digital Publishing Tools
- BBookXBBookX is a new technology that uses a human-assisted computing approach to enable creation of open source textbooks. BBookX uses intelligent algorithms to explore Open Educational Resource (OER) repositories and return relevant resources that can be combined, remixed, and re-used to support specific learning goals. As instructors and students add materials to their book, BBookX learns and further refines the recommended material.
- BooktypeBooktype is web based, single-source publishing software for creating beautiful books, reports, manuals and more. An open source platform ideal for editorial teams working on complex projects, Booktype is very, very fast.
- iBook AuthorAvailable free on the Mac App Store, iBooks Author is an amazing app that allows anyone to create beautiful textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad, iPhone, and Mac. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, mathematical expressions, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
- Obi: Daisy Audio Book Production ToolObi is a free open source audio book production tool that enables the production of digital talking books which conform to DAISY 3, Accessible EPUB 3 and DAISY 2.02 standards with minimal training.
- Open Access Book Publishers (Simmons Wiki)This is a list of publishers of OA books
- Open Book PublishersOpen Book Publishers we are changing the nature of the traditional academic book. Our books are published in hardback, paperback and ebook editions, but we also publish free online editions of every title in PDF, HTML and XML formats that can be read via our website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere.
- PressbooksPressbooks is a simple book formatting software. Design your book from start to finish in just a few easy steps, and create beautiful print books, ebooks, and webbooks for any genre.
- ScalarScalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.
- SUNY OER ServicesSUNY Community textbooks is a venue for SUNY faculty to share their openly licensed educational material. The work highlighted in this series have a variety of publishers, but are all authored by a SUNY faculty member, full courses or texts to be used in a college-level course, original work, or a significant remix or adaptation of another open work, licensed with a Creative Commons license, with no ND designation.
