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https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/27/best-selling-organic-chemistry-textbook-goes-open-access-after-professor-regains-the-copyright/>
"It’s well known that textbook prices are generally high. That’s in part
because academic publishers effectively have a monopoly when it comes to
standard texts. Very often, these are texts that students simply must have as
part of their course, which means they will pay even exorbitant prices.
One such book was John McMurry’s
Organic Chemistry. It’s regarded as
something of a classic in its field, and had a correspondingly high price tag:
around £70 in the UK, and $80 in the US. But that’s about to change thanks to
the generosity of McMurry. As a report in
Chemistry World explains, he
spotted that after 30 years he could ask for the book’s copyright to be
returned to him from the publisher. It’s ridiculous that academics were
expected to assign copyright in this way, but at least there was a time limit
in this case. McMurry has chosen to bring out the next edition of his book with
OpenStax:
OpenStax was founded in 1999 by Richard Baraniuk, an electrical engineering
professor at Rice University. Originally named Connexions, OpenStax started
as an Open Educational Resource (OER) repository where faculty around the
world could publish, share, and remix educational materials. We started
publishing our own line of free, peer-reviewed textbooks in 2012 to maximize
our impact by providing high quality, flexible, turnkey resources for
instructors and students at little to no cost.
It’s great news that OpenStax will be publishing future editions, and McMurry
deserves huge kudos for making the move."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
