The Free Curricula Center (FCC) is a new service for producing distributing OA textooks and other teaching and learning resources. (Thanks to The Assayer.) From the site:
The Free Curricula Center (FCC) helps students worldwide reach their educational potential by producing and distributing university level curricula that can be copied freely and modified cooperatively. Specifically, FCC serves as a focal point for the development and sharing of textbooks, instructor guides, and other educational materials. These materials, called free curricula, are released at no cost into the public domain or under an "open source" style license. This license allows anyone to make and distribute copies without having to pay, and to modify the curricula as long as those modifications are released under the same terms. The Center helps its participants work together to create textbooks, instructor guides, and other materials for the subjects in which they have expertise. We do this by providing online tools to help educators collaborate successfully and by proving a space on the Internet where students can have free, easy access to their finished products. We also serve as a link to the resources of others, and mirror their material when permitted....In short, the Center wants to do for educational curricula what open source software has done for computing: focus cooperative efforts to bring about low cost, high quality alternatives to commercial products.
FCC currently offers two OA textbooks, one in philosophy and one in statistics. Submissions are evaluated by one of four committees, depending on the discipline. Authors may choose from a variety of open licenses. FCC also hosts several discussion lists on FCC issues in different fields and a (currently small) set of working papers on OA-related issues. It welcomes submissions, new members for its committees, participants in its discussion groups, and donations. For more details, see the FAQ.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/24/2006 08:09:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
