... [T]he Indian National Council on Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free downloadable versions of many Indian K-12 text books. From this page, you can choose which year, and which subject, and receive the title desired. The first thing you get is a PDF with the contents, and at first I was very disappointed thinking that was the only thing I’d get, about to give up. Then I realized that the TOC is hyperlinked to the individual PDFs for the different chapters. ...
The books themselves seem great. They have text books for the subjects English, Hindi and Urdu, and for many subjects they also offer a Hindi or an English version, which often seem to be identical. ...
The thing that would make these books incredibly more useful though, is if they were affixed with a Creative Commons license, which enabled other people to use the material and creative derivatives. This would enable me to use parts of it in my own text books, translate the text, use illustrations in Wikipedia articles, etc. There might even be a lot of Indian NGOs that wish to use part of the material, but change it in different ways to make it more locally appropriate. Licensing it under CC would be great, but it’s not enough however. The final step is to make available the source files that were used in generating the PDFs, whether those are Photoshop Layers, or InDesign files. Otherwise it will be very difficult to for example translate the text, but keep the nice background illustrations. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 4/09/2008 01:55:00 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.
