The goal of this textbook is not to make you an expert. True expertise in any field is a years-long endeavor. Here I will survey some of the basic topics of chemistry. This survey should give you enough knowledge to appreciate the impact of chemistry in everyday life and, if necessary, prepare you for additional instruction in chemistry. Throughout each chapter, I present two features that reinforce the theme of the textbook—that chemistry is all around you. The first is a feature titled, appropriately, “Chemistry Is Everywhere.” Chemistry Is Everywhere” focuses on the personal hygiene products that you may use every morning: toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, among others. These products are chemicals, aren’t they? Ever wonder about the chemical reactions that they undergo to give you clean and healthy teeth or shiny hair? I will explore some of these chemical reactions in future chapters. But this feature makes it clear that chemistry is, indeed, everywhere. The other feature focuses on chemistry that you likely indulge in every day: eating and drinking. In the “Food and Drink App,” I discuss how the chemistry of the chapter applies to things that you eat and drink every day. Carbonated beverages depend on the behavior of gases, foods contain acids and bases, and we actually eat certain rocks. (Can you guess which rocks without looking ahead?) Cooking, eating, drinking, and metabolism—we are involved with all these chemical processes all the time. These two features allow us to see the things we interact with every day in a new light—as chemistry.

This paper presents the results of collaborative research between open textbook provider OpenStax College (OSC) and the OER Research Hub (OERRH), a Hewlett funded mixed methods open research project examining the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching.

The paper focuses primarily on the results of two surveys that were conducted with educators using a range of OSC open textbooks during 2013 and 2014/2015. The results of this research shows that OER such as OSC enables a majority of educators to better respond to student needs whilst often making teaching easier and in some instances changing teaching practices. Although this paper does not focus on the impact of OER on students, a majority of educators surveyed perceive an increase in student satisfaction when using OER such as OSC and believe that OSC are saving students money.

"Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost."

This is a supplementary video to support the Commonwealth of Learning's Open Textbook Manual. It shows you how to use the OER Commons Open Author Tool to create Open Textbooks.

The sixth episode of 'The Other Fifty Weeks: An Open Education Podcast", discussing initiatives at the University of Hawai'i Manoa with Billy Meinke.

This section of The Rebus Guide to Publishing Open Textbooks (So Far) will help you coordinate and implement peer review on your book, including advice on deciding what type of review is needed, the tools to use, creating a guide for reviewers, and more. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY) and you are welcome to print this document, make a copy for yourself, or share with others.

Please read through the sections below, and consider the suggestions as you begin the peer review stage of your project. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to post them in the Rebus Community project home. This document is an evolving draft, based on our experience managing open textbook projects and community feedback. We welcome your thoughts and contributions, so let us know how it works for you, or if you have any suggestions to improve the guide.

Physical Geology is a comprehensive introductory text on the physical aspects of geology, including rocks and minerals, plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciation, groundwater, streams, coasts, mass wasting, climate change, planetary geology and much more. It has a strong emphasis on examples from western Canada, especially British Columbia, and also includes a chapter devoted to the geological history of western Canada. The book is a collaboration of faculty from Earth Science departments at Universities and Colleges across British Columbia and elsewhere.

Prealgebra is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for a one-semester prealgebra course. The book’s organization makes it easy to adapt to a variety of course syllabi. The text introduces the fundamental concepts of algebra while addressing the needs of students with diverse backgrounds and learning styles. Each topic builds upon previously developed material to demonstrate the cohesiveness and structure of mathematics.

Principles of Microeconomics for AP Courses covers the scope and sequence for a one-semester Advance Placement Microeconomics course. The book is on the example textbook list for the AP course here. The text also includes many current examples, including; the Keystone Pipeline, Occupy Wall Street, and debates over the minimum wage.

This is a review of open access textbooks that could be used for the organismal, environmental, and evolutionary biology half of introductory biology for biology majors.