Two related OA textbooks initiatives from Florida:
In May, Governor Charlie Crist signed a bill (HB 7121) which created the Florida Distance Learning Consortium. The bill tasked the new consortium with, among other things, developing an "instructional content repository" and a "plan for promoting and increasing the use of open access textbooks as a method for reducing textbook costs".
That bill gave birth to the Orange Grove educational repository and the Open Acess Textbooks Task Force. The task force held its first meeting in July. The bill requires that the consortium submit the plan by March 2010.
On September 23, the consortium announced a collaboration with the University Press of Florida, creating Orange Grove Text Plus. OGT+ is an OA imprint of the press which uses the repository as its publishing platform. The imprint launched with 89 textbooks and 21 monographs from the press' backlist, and plans to add more.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/29/2009 05:39:00 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.
