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Open Access: Faculty Select (OER)

Information on open educational resources, including Creative Commons, institutional repository, databases, journals, eBooks, and textbooks.

Faculty Select for Open Access Textbooks

McKee Library supports open-access textbooks. The use of OA textbooks benefits the student and the professor.  While there are numerous open-access textbook options available online, searching for the content is time-consuming. With that in mind, McKee Library subscribes to Faculty Select. Information about this resource is available below. 

Faculty Select's Content

McKee Library provides access to Faculty Select. EBSCO Faculty Select empowers academic libraries to directly support textbook affordability efforts. Through a single interface, faculty can search over 500,000 records and access quality open textbooks, Open Educational Resources (OER), EBSCO’s eBook Open Access (OA) Collection and request access to unrestricted library e-books from top academic publishers. By leveraging free open materials and low-cost library-licensed resources, faculty can transform their courses and reduce the cost burden for students. Faculty Select includes three collections:

1. OER: Over 30,000 Open Educational Resources in one database, saving faculty time searching and collating materials from OER platforms which include BC Open Textbook Project, EBSCO eBook Open Access Collection, LibreTexts, Milne Open Textbooks, OAPEN, OpenStax, and Pressbooks Directory.

  • OER: Teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have a Creative Commons license, that can be downloaded, edited, and shared. 
  • A Creative Commons license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created.

2. OA eBooks: Scholarly research publications from top academic publishers that can be downloaded, edited, and shared.

3. Digital Rights Management Free (DRM-Free), unlimited-user, eBooks from several top academic publishers that have no restrictions on printing, saving, and downloading.