Learning is valuable, but in Africa it is more than that: It is prohibitively expensive. In Ethiopia, where the per-capita income is about $100 a year, a single textbook at Addis Ababa University can cost $50.
In order to get more textbooks to students in developing nations, two people are leading an ambitious project to produce and freely distribute 1,000 original titles online.
Richard T. Watson, interim head of the department of management information systems at the University of Georgia, and Donald J. McCubbrey, a professor of information technology and electronic commerce at the University of Denver, have started what they call the Global Text Project. This semester the project's first book, Information Systems, is being used at Addis Ababa University and at Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University, in Indonesia.
The endeavor relies on professors and experienced professionals worldwide to each write, pro bono, at least one chapter of a book. Each chapter is reviewed by a scholar. Editors then assemble the chapters into complete books. The books are written using wikis....
The endeavor is part of a larger movement to provide free academic material online....
The Global Text Project intends to publish books in Arabic, Chinese, English, and Spanish....
Already the University of Concepción, in Chile, has agreed to donate about 350 books, written by faculty members, for digitization in the Global Text library....
Once enough books are online, Mr. McCubbrey hopes to find sponsors who will provide money to keep the project growing. He says he may ask big companies, like Accenture, a consulting firm, and the 3M Company to pay for development. In return they would get their logos on the covers and at the beginning of each chapter....
Established academic publishers have not contributed to the project, but Mr. Watson is not counting them out. He is a consulting editor for John Wiley & Sons, and although he offered to resign from this post when he started the project, officials of the textbook publisher asked him to stay on and keep them in the loop....
One possibility is the donation of old textbooks. A lot of publishers have books lying around in warehouses that they could donate to the project in exchange for a tax break, he says. The books could be updated, digitized, and edited like other Global Text offerings.
"I'd rather work with the publishers to try to help them develop a new business model than have this be an antagonistic situation," says Mr. Watson.
His most immediate concern, though, is rounding up volunteers. "I might speak to an audience of 100 and recruit five or six people," he says. Most of the recruits are seasoned professors, since colleges typically don't count contributions to the project toward tenure or promotion....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/12/2007 04:04:00 PM.
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.
