Texas A&M Librarians Present Plan To Reduce Textbook Costs

From The Eagle (Bryan, TX):

Texas A&M librarians are working toward securing more free textbooks for students while allowing thousands of research papers to be read by the public, marking two goals discussed at a weekend workshop aimed at encouraging open access initiatives at SEC schools.
The world of free online textbooks and open access publishing is foreign to some professors who are comfortable in assigning the same textbooks each semester, said David Carlson, dean of the Texas A&M University Libraries.
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Carlson said he wants to mimic a University of Minnesota program in which teachers were paid to review online textbooks. Payment was given whether the review was positive or negative.
“They found when faculty members take a good, long look at open textbooks, about 40 percent, almost 50 percent, adopt the open textbook for a class,” Carlson said.

Read the Complete Article
See Also: More About the Workshop Here
See Also: University of Minnesota Launches Catalog of Peer-Reviewed Open Source Textbooks (May 10, 2012)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Journal Articles, Libraries, Open Access, Publishing, School Libraries