Open Educational Resources for Neuroscience

Open educational resources (OERs) promise to play an increasing role in making educational materials such as textbooks available to all and in helping to (slightly) mitigate exorbitant costs often associated with post-secondary education. True OERs provide the ability to use, distribute and even adapt available resources to fit with the needs of the user. Many other free resources often get lumped in with OERs but may have restrictions prohibiting specific forms of use, modification or distribution. In neuroscience, there is a growing collection of OER and open-access materials for instructors to consider incorporating into their courses, ranging from textbooks and other books to entire courses, a single lecture or videos and animations. This paper briefly reviews two free online textbooks for neuroscience. Further, the available platforms for organizing and distributing OERs are outlined and briefly discussed, with an emphasis on their usefulness at the present time for neuroscience education.