Open textbook
Introduction
Open textbooks are a kind of open educational resource (OER).
For wikipedia (May 2019), “An open textbook is a textbook licensed under an open copyright license, and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers and members of the public. Many open textbooks are distributed in either print, e-book, or audio formats that may be downloaded or purchased at little or no cost. Part of the broader open educational resources movement open textbooks increasingly are seen as a solution to challenges with traditionally published textbooks, such as access and affordability concerns.”
Open textbooks are most popular in the USA, because textbooks are required for most classes and add a lot to the cost of studying.
Research
There is some research on the use of open educational resources and open textbooks in particular. For now, see the bibliography at @ukopentextbooks.
Rights
Most initiatives adopt some kind of creative commons license. The most popular is probably Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike where users are allowed to use it and to modify it for non-commercial purposes under the conditions that their public is allowed the same. Work distributed by institutions may also use Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives fairly often, i.e. the texts can used and redistributed non-commercially, but not altered.
Links
- @UKOpenTextbooks
- Resources (@UKOpenTextbooks)