College Open Textbooks

College Open Textbooks is a project of the COT Education, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. Our mission is to drive awareness, adoption, and affordability of open textbooks. Our focus is on community colleges and other 2-year institutions of higher education and the first two years (lower division) of 4-year institutions. Some of our activities also apply to K-12, upper division, graduate school, and life-long learning.

An open textbook is an integrated course-associated learning tool that is in the public domain or has been open-licensed by the copyright holder to permit re-use without the necessity of asking permission of the copyright holder. Open textbooks improve learning and teaching by freeing instructors from constantly seeking permission. Open textbooks are free or inexpensive on the web and modestly priced for downloads, use on eReaders, or in bound format.

Our activities include listing open textbooks by subject, peer reviews and accessibility reviews of open textbooks. COT is not a repository of open textbooks; our listings point to textbooks on many repositories. About half of the textbooks we list are on the copyright holder’s own website.