It is not always easy to find high-quality books for free. Furthermore, the price of scientific works is increasing to such an extent that they are becoming prohibitively expensive. Open Access Week reminds us that there are alternatives.

Free, high-quality books? Surely it must be a scam? If that's what you're thinking, then you're not familiar with Open Access, whose international week ends today.

Mise à jour du 24 décembre 2025 : ajout du réseau HAL sciences.

Open Access: access to knowledge for all

Access to knowledge for all is a utopia: there are barriers linked to the basic conditions for accessing knowledge. MOOCs have demonstrated that it is not enough for online training to be free in order to be accessible to all. There must also be an appetite for knowledge and a minimum level of learning autonomy on the part of future learners.

However, it is undeniable that the price of scientific works is often prohibitive for individuals – students or teachers – as well as for educational or academic institutions. Today, it is not uncommon for a scientific work to cost several hundred euros or even more. And this is in fields that are evolving so rapidly that their content becomes obsolete in an ever-shorter period of time.

Reducing this cost, or even eliminating it altogether, contributes to this access to knowledge. That is why at Formation 3.0 we are so committed to open educational resources and Commons. Why in all our training courses, particularly European ones, all our resources can be reused by our learners, students or teachers. And why we make all these resources available on our dedicated pages.

Free books offered by scientific publishers

Some publishers have fully understood the benefits of opening up access to their publications and are participating in the Open Access movement that we are celebrating this week. And not the least of them.

I don't have enough space to list them all, but here are a few examples. Feel free to mention others in the comments section.

Springer Verlag is Europe's largest publishing group. Its management is generally perceived as conservative. However, this publisher offers high-quality open access collections. For example, I have drawn on thecollection IMISCOE to enrich the section on migration and asylum in my course on European citizenship.

The Central London University Press (UCL, not to be confused with the Catholic University of Louvain, which shares the same initials) also offers free books of undeniable scientific quality. These cover a wide range of subjects, including history, political science, urban planning and comparative literature.

The French edition also offers free, open-access books. The The Episteme Publishing House, a Swiss publisher specialising in social sciences, offers various works focusing on schools, including Au nom de l’inclusion, a book on inclusive education, which I will discuss in more detail shortly.

The réseau HAL sciences propose, lui, plus d’un million et demi d’ouvrages scientifiques majoritairement en français, mais pas seulement. Vous y trouverez aussi quelques livres en anglais. Ces ouvrages couvrent tous les champs scientifiques depuis les sciences de l’homme en passant par la chimie ou encore les sciences de l’environnement.

Free books are often available as PDF files that can be downloaded at no cost, while the paper version – and sometimes the electronic version in epub format – must still be purchased. However, for a student's budget or a school's budget, a free PDF is often preferable to an exorbitantly priced paper copy. If you want to read your PDF comfortably, I highly recommend To download Thorium, an e-book reader, which is also free. It allows you to adjust line spacing and character spacing, making it easier to read for people with dyslexia, for example.

Si vous cherchez aussi des livre gratuits pour vos enfants, visitez cette page.

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