Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, August 26, 2008

What's holding up OA textbooks in Canada?

Rusell McOrmond, Open Access textbooks, provincial ministers of education and Access Copyright, Enterprise Insights, August 19th, 2008.

... Textbooks are most often authored by people who are staff at educational institutions. This staff then sells (or often gives away) their work to educational publishers who then edit and re-sell the material back to the educational sector. These educational publishers then further demand high photocopying and other fees through organizations like Access Copyright. ...

There is an alternative, which is to make the textbook material freely available at the source (the educational author), use print-on-demand (or electronic reading), and skip the educational publishers entirely. ...

When Mark Leggott, a University Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, blogged about the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) encouraging academics to retain copyright, he suggested that this could “build a strong foundation for open access”. ...

CAUT is also a member of Access Copyright, and may be thinking more as royalty-demanding authors than as educators helping reduce high costs to students. ...