Open Educational Resource References

This page contains reference examples for open educational resourcesopens in new window (OERs). Many types of sources are available from OER repositories, including books, webpages, reports, slide presentations, and courses, in which case all that is needed is to follow the reference format for that source type. The following examples show a webpage, two textbooks, and lecture slides.

• Credit the authors as shown on the work. You may need to navigate to an “about this work” page to find authorship information.
• If multiple layers of contributors are listed, such as senior or primary contributors followed by other contributors, or a group contributor followed by the names of individuals, credit whoever is listed first in the reference (i.e., the senior/primary contributors or group), keeping in mind that the purpose of the reference is to allow readers to locate and identify the work, not to provide exhaustive information about it.
• If the resource has been updated, use the date of last update in the reference.
• Provide the year of publication of a book or report. For webpages, slide presentations, courses, and most other works, provide as specific a date as is available. This might be a year only; a year and month; or a year, month, and day.
• Italicize the title of the work. In the Spielman et al. (2024) example from OpenStax, the title includes edition information in a unique way that is fine to replicate in the reference. (Edition information is typically included in parentheses after the title.)
• Provide a description of the work in square brackets if needed to help readers identify less typical sources (e.g., lecture slides). The wording is flexible. Books do not need bracketed descriptions.
• Provide the name of the OER repository in the source element as the publisher. Common repositories are OER Commons, OASIS, MERLOT, OpenStax, and Lumen Learning. If the repository is also the author, as in the Lumen Learning example, omit the repository name in the source element to avoid repetition.
• When the work is designed to be updated over time but versions are not archived, as with the Lumen Learning example of a continuously updated textbook, include a retrieval date.
• Provide a URL that links as directly to the source as possible.