...Now there are quite a few examples of textbooks being made available online - free of cost - though one hasn't heard about such initiatives in India.
While BookPower.org is free only to developing countries, the California Open Source Textbook Project can be accessed at opensourcetext.org and a similar project is on commontext.org. There are also free high school science texts at nongnu.org/fhsst/ and the Open Textbook Project at otp.inlimine.org....
Libertas Academica OA textbooks are available at la-press.com/texts.htm while MedRounds Publications can be accessed via medrounds.org, Next/Text at futureofthebook.org/next/text/ and the Potto Project at potto.org
Textbook Revolution is a portal and collection, and is often labelled the 'best single site' at textbookrevolution.org and Wikibooks, linked to the Wikipedia project, is at en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_portal
India-based activist Prabhala, who till not long ago headed the Southern African Access to Learning Materials project at the Consumer Institute, South Africa, works on issues related to accessing textbooks.
One of the recent studies he worked on was about barriers to access to learning materials in primary and secondary schools in selected 'developing countries', with a focus on copyright law.
Yet another was on the feasibility of an 'open textbook policy' for primary and secondary education textbooks, to be adopted by the South African government.
Prabhala told IANS: 'I'm not aware of any initiatives that create or distribute open access textbooks in India. One important example is the Free High School Science Texts project in South Africa (www.fhsst.org).' ...
Prabhala noted that textbooks in Karnataka were available online, were freely downloadable and could be republished, thanks to the Azim Premji Foundation that has been working with the state education department.
'So while in theory all government textbooks are open access - not all states, nor the central government, have their books up online,' Prabhala said....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/05/2007 11:20:00 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.
