Open Educational Resources and Chemistry

This collection was curated by an ASCCC OERI discipline lead. A comprehensive list of current discipline leads is available.

 The curated collection of resource shared here have been organized into three categories:

  • OER textbooks for the course
  • Other OER for the course
  • Free, but copyright-protected resources for the course

Within each of these three categories, resources are listed from most relevant to least relevant for each course. When two items have similar relevance for the course, the more recent resource is listed first.

Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Open Educational Resources

Free Copyright-protected Resources

Selected activities from Chem Ed Xchange

The Division of Chemical Education, Inc. of the American Chemical Society holds the copyright for all content on the Chem Ed X website. Instructors are allowed to use the activities for their classrooms. The activities can be used to supplement a text with specific concepts. Several activities adapted for remote classrooms are available.

Chemistry 100 – Chemistry and Society (C-ID CHEM 100)

OER Textbooks for Chemistry 100

Additional OER for Chemistry 100

See Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Free Copyright-protected Resources for Chemistry 100

Chemistry 101 – Introduction to Chemistry (C-ID CHEM 101)

OER Textbooks for Chemistry 101

Additional OER for Chemistry 101

Free Copyright-protected Resources for Chemistry 101

Chemistry 102 – Introduction to Organic and Biological Chemistry (C-ID CHEM 102)

OER Textbooks for Chemistry 102

Additional OER for Chemistry 102

See Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Free Copyright-protected Resources for Chemistry 102

See Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Resources for Environmental Chemistry (C-ID CHEM 105) and Environmental Chemistry with Lab (C-ID CHEM 106 B)

Resources for General Chemistry for Majors (C-ID CHEM 110 and 120 S)

Chemistry 140 – Survey of Chemistry and Physics (C-ID CHEM 140)


OER Textbooks for Chemistry 140

    None identified. It may be possible to use resources listed under C-ID CHEM 100 and C-ID CHEM 101 for the course. But these resources do not cover some topics listed in the course description. Specifically, topics in “Motions, Forces, and Energy”, “Electricity and Magnetism”, and “Waves and Light” are not fully covered in these texts.

Additional OER for Chemistry 140

See Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Free Copyright-protected Resources for Chemistry 140

See Resources for all Chemistry Courses

Resources for Organic Chemistry for Majors (C-ID CHEM 150 and 160 S)

OER Textbooks for Chemistry 150 and 160 S

  • Organic Chemistry: A Tenth Edition (McMurry, 2023) – OpenStax (CC BY-NC-SA)

    Organic Chemistry: A Tenth Edition, like previous editions, is intended for a two-semester introductory organic chemistry course. The tenth edition retains the functional group approach of prior editions and the table of contents is retained. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY NC-SA) license, which means that you can non-commercially distribute, remix, and build upon the content, as long as you provide attribution to OpenStax and its content contributors, under the same license.

  • LibreTexts Organic Chemistry (LibreTexts, 2022) (CC BY-SA)

    Text covers all topics necessary for 1st and 2nd semesters of organic chemistry.

Additional OER for Chemistry 150 and 160 S

  • OpenOChem Cloud Homework System (LeBlond, Muzyka, Bocholtz, Greeves, 2020) (CC0 – Public Domain)
    A freely available online homework system that allows users to create interactive questions, and then assemble them into activities such as sequential and adaptive quizzes and SlideDecks. This system uses LTI, so that students and faculty members access it through their home institutions learning management systems (e.g., Moodle and Canvas). The system allows for creation and sharing of content and questions for users in the OpenOChem community. There are currently +3,500 homework problems in the system.
  • Spectral Database for Organic Compounds (National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, 1999-current) The copyright is owned by the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, which provides free access of chemical spectra to the community and maintains the spectral database.
    SDBS is an integrated spectral database system for organic compounds, which includes 6 different types of spectra under a directory of the compounds. The six spectra are as follows, an electron impact Mass spectrum (EI-MS), a Fourier transform infrared spectrum (FT-IR), a 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum, a 13C NMR spectrum, a laser Raman spectrum, and an electron spin resonance (ESR) spectrum. The database contains +34,000 spectra.

Using an OER resource that is missing from the list above? If so, please let us know.

This page last updated December 8th, 2022.