LibGuides: Nursing: Open Educational Resources

NCLEX-RN Test Prep

Khan Academy NCLEX-RN Test Prep
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A collection of questions from content covered on the NCLEX-RN. These questions are available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license

General Nursing Resources

OpenStax Nursing coming soon...
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Textbooks for the following topics are coming soon: Fundamentals and Skills, Maternal-Newborn Nursing, Medical-Surgical Nursing, Nutrition and Pharmacology, Nutrition for Nurses, Pharmacology for Nurses, Population and Community Health, Population Health for Nurses, and Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing

Nursing Skills by Chippewa Valley Technical College, Elizabeth Christman, DNP, RN, CNE and Kimberly Ernstmeyer, MSN, RN, CNE, CHSE, APNP-BC
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ISBN: 9781734914122
Publication Date: June 2021
1st edition - This open access Nursing Skills textbook includes physical assessments routinely performed by entry-level registered nurses and basic nursing skills performed by licensed practical nurses.

Open RN Coming Soon...
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The Open RN project is funded by a $2.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Education to create 5 OER Nursing Textbooks with 25 associated Virtual Reality scenarios. The first three of these textbooks, Nursing Pharmacology, Nursing Skills, and Nursing Fundamental, have recently been published. The next two texts, Mental Health & Community Concepts and Management & Professional Concepts, are scheduled to be published in the Fall of 2022.

Innovative Lesson Plans for Active Learning: Teaching Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice by Susan M. Strouse, PhD, RN; et al.
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Publication Date: 2018
Innovative Lessons Plans for Active Learning: Teaching Research and Evidence-Based Practice is a resource in research and evidence-based practice for active learning in the undergraduate nursing classroom. It is meant to supplement any nursing research text. Designed to provide educators with creative teaching ideas, this text includes a variety of lessons on nursing research topics.
Building a Medical Terminology Foundation by Kimberlee Carter and Marie Rutherford
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Publication Date: 2020-08-04
Building a Medical Terminology Foundation is an OER that focuses on breaking down medical terms into their word parts, pronouncing medical terms, and learning the meaning of medical terms within the context of introductory anatomy and physiology. This resource is targeted for health office administration and health services students in the first year of their college programs.
Documentation in Nursing: 1st Canadian edition by Jennifer Lapum, Oona St-Amant, Charlene Ronquillo, Michelle Hughes and Joy Garmaise-Yee
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Publication Date: 2020
This open access textbook is intended to guide best practices of documentation in the nursing profession. This resource is designed for students in undergraduate nursing programs, and addresses principles of documentation, legislation associated with documentation, methods and systems of documentation, and key trends in the future of documentation.
The Scholarship of Writing in Nursing Education: 1st Canadian Edition by Jennifer Lapum; Oona St-Amant; Michelle Hughes; Andy Tan; Arina Bogdan; Frances Dimaranan; Rachel Frantzke; and Nada Savicevic
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Publication Date: 2019
This open access textbook is intended to guide best practices in the journey of scholarly writing in the context of the nursing profession. This resource is designed for students in undergraduate nursing programs and may also be useful for students in other health-related post-secondary programs, graduate students, and healthcare providers.
Professional Communication in Health Professions by Jennifer Lapum; Oona St-Amant; Michelle Hughes; and Joy Garmaise-Yee (editors)
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ISBN: 9781990641299
Publication Date: 2021
This open access textbook is intended to guide best practices in communication in the context of the nursing profession. The resource addresses communication theory, therapeutic communication and interviewing, and inter-professional communication as it relates to nursing. This resource is designed for students in undergraduate nursing programs.
Medical Terminology for Healthcare Professions by Andrea Nelson and Katherine Greene
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Publication Date: 2021-12-14
Medical Terminology for Healthcare Professions is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that focuses on breaking down, pronouncing, and learning the meaning of medical terms within the context of anatomy and physiology. This resource is targeted for Healthcare Administration, Health Sciences, and Pre-Professional students.
From Anxiety to Action: A Clinical Instructor Guide to Safe and Confident Medication Administration by Bojan Stoiljkovic; Debbie Kahler; and Jasmine Balakumaran
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Clinical instructors are the bridge between the classroom, lab and the clinical environment. They demystify the process of medication administration for students, instill a sense of responsibility and diligence necessary for safe practice. Clinical instructors are in a unique position to mitigate the anxiety many students feel about medication administration and the potential for errors. With this information in mind, this resource has been developed to focus on building clinical instructors’ skills in supporting students as they learn safe medication administration. In addition to guiding the process of safe medication administration, practical application examples and resources are also provided.

OpenLearn - Nursing
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OpenLearn provides a number of free courses, supplementary readings, videos, and other course materials on a variety of subjects, including Nursing.
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Unless specifically stated in a Creative Commons licence which may be attached to some Open University content (“Creative Commons Licence”), you may not copy, reproduce, republish, disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use Open University content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use.
Johns Hopkins Open Courseware
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OCW offers open materials and images from more than a hundred courses developed by the faculty of JHSPH, the world’s foremost institution of public health education and research. OCW is an expression of our mission to provide learning opportunities and teaching resources to all who pursue improvement of health and prevention of disease around the world.
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Included in their list of openly licensed courses are: Patient Safety and Medical Errors, Child Health and Development, numerous nutrition courses, and more.
Associate of Science in Nursing
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The OTC Associate of Science in Nursing program will prepare students to provide quality health care and function as a member of an interdisciplinary health team in order to apply critical thinking skills within this field as well as promote healthy lifestyles to individuals, groups and communities. The program will equip graduates to fulfill the roles of both care provider and care manager within the discipline of nursing.
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Please note that all course materials and content are provided in the IMS Common Cartridge (IMSCC) format. The content can be accessed by opening the IMSCC file using your organization's Learning Management System application (these include Blackboard, D2L, Canvas etc.).

Wisc-Online Nursing OER
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Interactive tutorials in the area of nursing. You will find 25 free learning objects that can help you learn, study, or teach Nursing.
EthnoMed
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The objective of the website is to make information about culture, language, health, illness and community resources directly accessible to health care providers who see patients from different ethnic groups. EthnoMed was designed to be used in clinics by care providers in the few minutes before seeing a patient in clinic.

LibreTexts: Medicine Library
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The LibreTexts Medicine Library includes a number of openly licensed Nursing books, including Vital Sign Measurement Across the Lifespan and Leadership and Influencing Change in Nursing. The Harrisburg Area Community College also includes the openly licensed course Health Assessment in Nursing.
Merlot II: Nursing
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Curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community. Filtered for "NURSING" and "HAS CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE"
Nursing and Allied Health Resources Caucus Archive
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If you are a student nurse looking for one website with a plethora of free and informative resources, look no further than Nursing and Allied Health Resources of the online Medical Library Association. Just a glance at the left sidebar will leave you feeling overwhelmed with databases, literature, surveys, PowerPoint presentations, and any more helpful resources.
Open Michigan - Medical
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Open Courses & Textbooks created by the University of Michigan's Medical School.
Open Michigan - Nursing
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Open Courses created by The University of Michigan's School of Nursing.
Open Michigan - Global Health
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A collected list of Open Courses & Textbooks from the University of Michigan, including the 1000+ OBGYN Project and the African Health OER Network.

MedPix
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MedPix® is a free open-access online database of medical images, teaching cases, and clinical topics, integrating images and textual metadata including over 12,000 patient case scenarios, 9,000 topics, and nearly 59,000 images, provided by the National Library of Medicine.
Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
Much of the information critical to the communication of public health messages is pictorial rather than text-based. Created by a Working Group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL offers an organized, universal electronic gateway to CDC's pictures. We welcome public health professionals, the media, laboratory scientists, educators, students, and the worldwide public to use this material for reference, teaching, presentation, and public health messages.
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The imagery showcased in the PHIL is historic in nature; the contents depicted, though appropriate at the time a photograph was captured, may no longer be appropriate in the context of the current time period, and is not to be viewed as a source of the most current public health information.
Images from the History of Medicine (NLM)
Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) in NLM Digital Collections provides online access to images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. IHM includes image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.
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IHM is available through NLM Digital Collections, a free online resource of biomedical books and still and moving images.

Highlighted OER

Skills Commons is one of the best existing collections of Open Courses and OERs for Technical Programs and the Skilled Trades

SkillsCommons: Workforce Development Digital Library
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SkillsCommons’ mission is to accelerate the democratization of education for all through open educational services and resources enabling individuals, communities, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses to prepare people for successful employment in the 21st Century.
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This is a great starting resource for Technical Programs.

Open Access Journals

Sage Open Nursing
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SAGE Open Nursing (SON) is a peer-reviewed open access journal which covers all aspects of nursing and patient care across the various nursing specialties and related disciplines.
Wiley Nursing Open
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Nursing Open is a peer reviewed open access journal with articles on all aspects of nursing and midwifery practice, research, education and policy.
The Open Nursing Journal
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An Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal, which publishes research articles, reviews/mini-reviews, letters and guest edited thematic issues in all areas of nursing.
Open Journal of Nursing
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Open Journal of Nursing (OJN) is an open, international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the latest advancements in nursing. The goal of this journal is to provide a platform for scientists and academicians all over the world to promote, share, and discuss various new issues and developments in different areas of nursing.
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Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, CC BY (or the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License CC BY-NC), which allows users to (noncommercially) copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.
MedEd Portal
MedEdPORTAL is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of teaching and learning resources in the health professions published by the Association of American Medical Colleges, in partnership with the American Dental Education Association. These publications are stand-alone, complete teaching or learning modules that have been implemented and evaluated with medical or dental trainees or practitioners.

Get Started Searching for OERs

Since OERs are typically digital, the best place to look is online. If you're just getting started, you may want to forgo a Google Search and start looking in well known OER Repositories (listed at the bottom of this page in the OER Collections box). Some of the most common starting places for faculty are the Open Textbook Library, Lumen Learning, and OpenStax.

As OER become more popular, more powerful search tools are being developed. The Mason OER Metafinder (the MOM) and OASIS are two such search engines. These two resources search across a variety of known OER repositories, presenting results from multiple locations in one convenient place.

College and University LibGuides are another great place to look for discipline-specific resources. Librarians take great care in selecting resources that they think best suit the needs of their faculty.

And, of course, when you feel comfortable in your ability to find and recognize OER, Google Searching is always a viable option. Combine subject-specific search terms with recommended OER search terms to get started. Remember when browsing online to always check the license, terms, and conditions associated with a resource to be sure that it is OER!

The resources listed in the OER Collections box below are a great starting place for any OER search!

Recommended Search Terms:

Open Educational Resources
OER or OERs
OER Textbooks
Open Access or Open Access Journals
Open Textbooks
Open Education
Open Source
Creative Commons or Creative Commons Licensed
Public Domain

Combine these or other terms with your subject-based terms

Collections of Resources

Opendora
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Opendora, developed by PALS, is a digital archive for open educational resources that serves as a central repository for Minnesota State faculty and librarians to leverage licensed open educational resources (OER) with the ability to access, load, and share material.
Open Textbook Library
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A comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks. All textbooks are free, and the majority are peer reviewed.
OpenStax
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High-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print.
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Additionally available: low-cost, research-based courseware that gives students the tools they need to complete their course the first time around, and a new online math homework system with step-level feedback.
BC Campus OpenEd
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The B.C. Open Textbook Collection is home to a growing selection of open textbooks for a variety of subjects and specialties. Discover open textbooks that have been reviewed by faculty, meet our accessibility requirements, and/or include ancillary materials (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).
Textbook Equity Open Education
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These are university-quality textbooks: Most contain exercises, discussion questions, problem sets. Most have appendices, supplemental materials and bibliographies. Academically reviewed and tested in the classrooms. PDF versions are free.
2012 Book Archive
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This is the archive of Creative Commons-licensed copies of all the books which were available online from a specific publisher at the end of 2012. In late 2012, they decided that the process of giving away access to their textbooks online wasn't working, and decided to switch to a different model, requiring students to pay for access to the books starting in 2013. The original versions of those books are still available under the original license, made available here.
OAPEN
OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing a digital collection of open-access books
LibreTexts
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The LibreTexts mission is to unite students, faculty and scholars in a cooperative effort to develop an easy-to-use online platform for the construction, customization, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) to reduce the burdens of unreasonable textbook costs to our students and society. "Explore the Libraries" to get started finding resources
Utah State University Press
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Utah State University’s (USU) Institutional Repository (IR) supports open access initiatives and contributes to USU’s intellectual output and engagement with global scholarly resources. The purpose of this repository is to archive and provide open access to the scholarly works, research, reports, publications, teaching materials, workshops, and lectures produced by USU faculty, staff, students, and organizations.
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Effective January 2021, content in the Institutional Repository (IR) will be available under open licensing or Creative Commons By Attribution (CC-BY) Licenses unless noted otherwise in individual items. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/about.html
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
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DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers.
Open Research Library
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The Open Research Library (ORL) is planned to include all Open Access book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 14,000 Open Access books.

Skills Commons
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Skills Commons makes available open access Courses and Course Materials, especially those pertaining to Technical Programs.
Lumen Learning
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Lumen course materials replace expensive textbooks and provide: Engaging, interactive content (text, video, simulations, practice questions, etc.), Continuous improvements to support increased learning, Accessible and mobile-friendly, Available for 50+ high-enrollment subjects
Lumen Learning - Boundless Catalog
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This catalog contains educational content originally curated by Boundless. Lumen maintains the Boundless content in the same condition it was provided to us, and courses may contain some formatting and accessibility issues.
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Except where otherwise noted, all material in Boundless courses are licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
Lumen Learning - Achieving the Dream Catalog
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This catalog contains openly-licensed course materials developed for the Open Educational Resources (OER) Degree Initiative, led by Achieving the Dream. Lumen maintains this content in the same condition it was provided to us by participating faculty and institutions.
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Except where otherwise noted, all material is licensed under a CC BY license.
Saylor Academy
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Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative working since 2008 to offer free and open online courses to all who want to learn. They offer nearly 100 full-length courses at the college and professional levels, each of which is available right now — at your pace, on your schedule, and free of cost.
OpenLab
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City Tech’s OpenLab is an open-source digital platform where students, faculty, and staff can meet to learn, work, and share their ideas. Use the search and filters to find a Courses with Creative Commons Licenses.

Canvas Commons

Canvas Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. A digital library full of educational content, including OERs, Commons allows Canvas users to share learning resources with other users as well as import learning resources into a Canvas course.

Available in all Canvas Free for Teacher (FFT) Accounts

Learn more about how to get started.

Pixabay
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A collection of new, high quality images that have been dedicated to the Public Domain by their creators.
Unsplash
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The images in this collection are high quality and new.
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The Unsplash License page outlines the terms of use, stating that these images have been dedicated to the public domain.
Pexels
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This site provides free stock photos, a collection of which have been licensed with a Creative Commons License.
Flickr
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This site includes CC Licensed Images and other media, such as videos. Each item includes a CC License detailing the ways in which the item can be used.
Wikimedia Commons
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This site includes CC Licensed Images and other media, such as videos. Each item includes a CC License detailing the ways in which the item can be used.

TED Talks
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TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).
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TED Talks recordings are owned by TED, provided on TED.com and any other site that we manage or license to. Unless otherwise indicated on the website, audio and video files, transcripts and/or information about a speaker are licensed via Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International), which means that certain TED Content may be used for personal and/or educational purposes as long as the license terms and TED Talks’ Usage Policy are followed.
FedFlix
FedFix features the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors, all of these fine flix are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever.
DOE Science Cinema
Contains multimedia videos highlighting the U.S. Department of Energy's scientific research. State-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology allows the user to search for specific words and phrases spoken by the presenter in these video files. Simply enter a term and the results list will point to the precise snippets of the video where the term was spoken.
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As government created resources, these should be part of the Public Domain, but please check each resource's license before use.

Sage Publishing Open Access
All articles published in the journals provide worldwide, barrier-free access to the full-text of articles online, immediately on publication under a creative commons license. All articles are rigorously peer-reviewed retaining the quality hallmarks of the academic publishing process that authors would experience in publishing in any traditional SAGE journal.
Wiley Open Access
Wiley Open Access publishes authoritative peer reviewed open access journals across many research disciplines.
Elsevier Open Access
All articles in open access journals which are published by Elsevier have undergone peer review and upon acceptance are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download.
Peer Reviewed Journals
Peer review is the essential part for maintaining substantial standard in publishing and brings out the best possible scientific novel information from the potential authors and researchers globally. This Open Access Publishing house has around 700+ peer-reviewed journals, 50,000 eminent and renowned Editorial Board members, and highly qualified, expert reviewers to meet the objectives of the Peer-Review Process.
SCIRP
Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) is one of the largest Open Access journal publishers. It is currently publishing more than 200 open access, online, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
Hindawi
One of the world's largest fully open access journal publishers. We believe in openness, in scholarly publishing and research communication.

Nursing

About OERs

Creative Commons Licenses

How to Provide Attribution