Affordable Course Materials: Home

The purpose of this guide is to promote awareness of, and access to, course materials that are up-to-date, meet pedagogical needs, and are affordable to students.

Adapted, with permission, from Emory University Libraries’ “Affordable Textbooks and Teaching Materials.”        

Library Course Reserves 

Library books, articles, videos and other materials may be placed on hold for a university course at Fondren Library. Course Reserve items have much shorter circulation periods for the duration of the semester. An electronic course reserve system called Ares facilitates access to electronic materials.

• Fondren Course Reserves

Canvas 

Fondren encourages instructors to direct link to library owned/licensed content within Canvas so students can freely access material. 

By linking  to subscribed content (unlike downloading PDFs for these purposes), you provide easy yet secure access to desired readings, without activating the need for copyright clearance fees.

• Linking to Fondren Resources: How to build stable links for ereserves, Canvas, etc. 
• Canvas Resources: Resources maintained by Rice Learning Environments
• Copyright and Fair Use: Canvas: Fondren Library guide

Ebooks

Fondren’s collections include a number of ebooks. Although available titles generally are not textbooks, many might meet course needs.

Library-licensed ebooks can be found using OneSearch and in numerous databases. Detailed information about how to find ebooks can be found in this Fondren guide. If you would like the library to purchase a new ebook, please submit a Suggest Purchase request or contact your subject librarian. This process can take time, so please submit requests as early as possible.

Note that many ebooks have access restrictions, which may limit the number of students who can access the book at the same time. Your subject librarian will be able to verify any restrictions and may be able to secure additional rights.

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available educational materials that can be modified and redistributed by users. They can include any type of educational resource, from syllabi to full courses. Attributes of OER include:

• Openly-licensed (under a Creative Commons license or similar)
• Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online with no fee to access. Physical OER may be sold at a low cost to facilitate printing.
• Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing. Ideally, it should also be available in an editable format.

There are a number of resources available for finding high-quality OER in your subject area, including:

• MERLOT: Search a collection of peer-reviewed OER and faculty-developed services.
• Open Textbook Library: Provides a growing catalog of free, peer-reviewed, and openly-licensed textbooks.
• OER Commons: A resource to support and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of OER. Includes resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.
• OpenStax: A nonprofit educational initiative based at Rice University, publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed , openly licensed college textbooks that are freely available online and low cost in print.

Additional information about finding and using OER can be found at this Fondren guide.

Open Access 

Open access (OA) refers to peer-reviewed scholarly research and literature that is free, online, and openly licensed for sharing. Many publishers make journal articles and, increasingly, books and book chapters open. OA repositories--including subject and institutional repositories-- preserve and provide access to this material, often in the form of articles, preprints, reprints, data, theses, dissertations, and other media. 

• Fondren Collections: OneSearch is the library’s search and discovery platform that includes the library catalog and other collections. Step by step instructions to filter search results for OA content can be found here. To access OneSearch, begin with the big box on the library's homepage.

• Searching for Open Access Articles: Provides additional tips for finding open content online, including using Google Scholar, Unpaywall, and the Open Access Button.

• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB): A searchable database of peer reviewed monographs that have been made accessible by academic publishers in open access.

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): A community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

• Open Access Directory: Provides a list of open access disciplinary repositories.

• Rice Digital Scholarship Archive: Rice's institutional repository, where the university's intellectual output is shared, managed, searched, and preserved. Most materials come from Rice faculty members' research, electronic theses and dissertations, and digitized collections of rare or unique books, images, musical performances, and manuscripts.

Many open access publications use Creative Commons (CC) licenses. To learn more about how you can use CC-licensed content, see Fondren’s Creative Commons Guide