Open Science Textbooks
First Session

Open Brainstorming Questions

1. Is there a need for free open access science textbooks
2. barriers
3. mode of production
4. existing efforts

Think about existing model. Financial

Alberts a great book. Not a representative sample.
Donald McQuary
Steven King

All of higher education is moving to online mode.
Lectures, reference material…The university its self is going to move out into the web.

Goal is for protegee.

At the level of the primary profit producer, then it’s not for the money. For the love of it.

Other than a small percentage there is not incentive to publish.
All students will have free textbooks.

Pragmatic programmer – beta versions. The programmer write the books. Buy the pdf  for a little bit or the other in published.

Great for student/researchers with disability.

PDF – is there a better format.

Open Access Textbooks is not a technology problem it’s a social problem. This is a content problem.

Who writes this? Scholarly content.

Who gets credit. No academic is going to pay to publish a chapter in a textbook.

It’s a special animal that’s writes textbooks. They are an enormous amount of work.

If we agree that this will cost money. Writing a textbook seems like a waste of resources. We should improve Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has a good access but it is special. Wikipedia lacks pre-though and design. A syllabus. Something structured.

Collaboration in a long coherent integrated document.

First textbook written – free online textbook. All we would have to do is to trump the current textbook. $50,000 That could write a textbook.

People in academia want credit for what they do.

First year tenure track create a textbook.
People could write proposals to decide what textbook should be written.

The hardest part in online collaborate is starting it.
What’s the size, a field with a need.

Prior efforts – bioinformatics.

In New Zealand we don’t have copies of the book. Book sized tablet.

M.I.T. open courseware. Non-commerical, share alike license. An academic institution that charges for course fees is a commercial place. There isn’t that much properly license stuff.

Authors (attribution) of Data Prvenence issues citation of citation of citation…(circular citation). How do we evolve social and technical issues.

When is a textbook finished.