Open textbook publishing - world.edu

As a major intersection in the teaching and learning process, the textbook is a contested genre. Given changes in students’ reading patterns—the movement away from alphabetic texts toward multimedia web texts and students’ tendency to surf from page to page—the authority of the traditional textbook is under scrutiny. And the costs for educational materials can be so excessive that they prohibit some students from pursuing their academic dreams. Economics professor Mark Perry, writing for the American Enterprise Institute blog on December 24, 2012, calculated that the price of educational supplies (primarily college textbooks) increased 812 percent between 1978 and 2012—well beyond increases in the cost of medical services or new home prices. In turn, the National Association of College Stores estimates that US students pay a national annual average of $655 on educational materials. Other estimates have ranged from $1,000 to $1,200 per year. Criticism of publishers by students, parents, and legislators has been widespread. For example, on its 'Making Textbooks Affordable' web page, the Student Public Interest Research Group argues, 'Publishing companies have been raking in huge profits while engaging in bad practices that drive up costs.' Yet publishers are not the sole beneficiaries of high textbook prices; others are also responsible for escalating costs. College bookstores typically add 30 percent for taking textbooks out of the box and putting them on a shelf. In addition, piracy of educational content, the used book market, and textbook rental programs fuel higher prices for educational materials while also undermining the rights of faculty members to be compensated for their intellectual work ... Publishers do, however, hoard enormous war chests from sales of educational materials, and we should question whether they have taken control of teaching and learning processes that would be more appropriately owned and overseen by academics. For instance, the $9 billion that Pearson made in 2012, as panelists Martin Kich and Linda Rouillard pointed out in a session at the 2013 AAUP Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education, is funding the company’s ongoing effort to seize control of higher education processes such as the administration, design, and implementation of GED certification, state and national certification of teaching, and the online development and assessment of general education coursework ... In 2008, when I received copyright back from Pearson for College Writing Online, a textbook I’d published online in 2003, I decided to self-publish the work. Rather than pursuing a for-profit model, I opted to give the book away for free, first at http://collegewriting.org and later at http://writingcommons.org. With hopes of developing a community around my project, I established a distinguished editorial board and review board, and I invited my colleagues to submit “web texts”— that is, texts designed for web-based publication—for the project. Since then, rather than helping merely a handful of students, the work has been viewed by over half a million people, and we’ve been able to publish original, peer-reviewed web texts ... Creative Commons provides licenses for diverse rhetorical contexts. Most open-education enthusiasts recommend the BY-SA license, which permits users to develop derivative as well as commercial works (BY refers to the attribution requirement and SA, share alike, requires derivative works to be distrubuted under the same license). The Open Knowledge Foundation and QuestionCopyright.org believe that Creative Commons should retire its NC-ND (noncommercial, nonderivative) clauses. The Free Culture Foundation argues that the NC-ND clause is “completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work).” Timothy Vollmer, writing for the Creative Commons blog on December 17, 2012, asserts that licenses that include BY-NC, BY-ND, BY-NC-SA, BYNC- ND clauses, which limit remixing and repurposing, should be renamed 'commercial rights reserved' ... The Directory of Open Access Journals, http:// www.doaj.org/, lists nearly ten thousand journals across disciplines. Many university presses provide free access to online versions of books. For pedagogical works, choices have tended to be more scattered. Viable options include Writing Commons (http:// writingcommons.org), Connexions (http://cnx.org), Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page), and MIT’s OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/index .htm) ..."