Open access textbooks

I got to attend an Elluminate session on the Stitz-Zeager Open Access Precalculus Project on January 13. Dr. Stitz and Dr. Zeager worked on this open textbook project for no other reason than they wanted to have a better textbook that was also less expensive than those available from textbook publishers. They both got a sabbatical from their separate institutions to work on the project. Apparently their institutions did NOT ask for any rights to the material and it's available under a Creative Commons license. Right now their site is bare-bones http://www.stitz-zeager.com/Free_College_Algebra_Book_Download.html It's under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. They've used the book themselves with WebAssign (an online homework and grading system) with good results. As yet there is no teachers solution manual and no quiz bank. The authors say they were not concerned at all about royalties. They said that they are getting paid enough on their job and were not concerned about making any additional money. What about tenure and promotion? Neither of them were counting on the textbook as a major part of their portfolio for tenure and promotion. Very nifty!

Note: David Nelson sent the direct link to the archive: http://bit.ly/g9IRYh and if that doesn't work, the session can be reached at:
http://cccconfer.org/MyConfer/OpenArchives.aspx?ShowType=Webinars where you can search for it by title or date

What does open access cost? arVix

Article in the Chronicle on Cornell University looking for additional institutions to help maintain arXiv which "is going well." I went back to one of Jennifer Howard's earlier items on arXiv.org: "[arXiv.org] holds nearly 600,000 e-prints of research articles, many of which appear there before they make their way through the formal journal-publishing process. It costs Cornell about $400,000 a year to maintain arXiv... Calling arXiv “a lifeline” for areas of the world with limited access to scholarly publishing resources, Ms. Kenney emphasized that arXiv will continue to be open access. Individual users will not be charged to submit or to review its contents..." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/cornell-library-proposes-new-model-to-keep-arxiv-going/20673 (January 21, 2010). Even distributing material for free entails costs.

Orange Gove Texts Plus - Florida's K-20 open access initiative

I attended a presentation on the USF campus given by Susie Henderson and Meredith Morris-Babb on the Orange Grove and Orange Grove Texts Plus - see more at http://www.theorangegrove.org/OGTtest.htm. This open textbook initiative is a partnership between Orange Grove Digital Repository and the University Press of Florida (UPF). Textbooks included in the repository can be downloaded or ordered in hard copy (print-on-demand) at around half the cost of a traditional textbook. What's the incentive for faculty to contribute textbooks?? UPF can ensure that the books are peer-reviewed and that faculty are allowed to collect royalities. There's a possibility that the work may count toward tenure and promotion and there's a potential for some royalties. That seems to take care of some of the issues many faculty have with producing open textbooks! (Interestingly I'm not finding any mention of that a the Orange Grove site.) Some campuses are busy providing faculty with various kinds of incentives to contribute to the open textbook initiative. Some campuses are providing funds to buy-out a course so a faculty member can author a textbook. Some campuses providing a pool of money for a department so that a group of faculty can work together on authoring an open source textbook. The books are indexed according to Florida's common course numbering system as well as other keywords, etc. There are around 100 textbooks at this point...