If you talk about Open Access to most university staff – teachers, researchers, students, librarians – they automatically think of OA journals\u00a0with articles available without cost to the whole world, or of subscription-funded (“paywalled”) journals that will make individual articles openly accessible for a charge.\u00a0\u00a0One of the original hopes of the Open Access movement was that openness would reach a tipping point at which libraries could begin cancelling subscriptions but so far there is no real evidence that this is likely to happen in the near future and\u00a0universities are not receiving any immediate financial benefit, although scholarship as a whole is richer and members of the public without access to university library resources are now able to access a significant proportion\u00a0of published research.<\/p>\n
The other group who bear a substantial \u00a0burden in funding university education are the students and they receive almost no immediate benefit from the money going to OA publishing, while on the other hand they are often required to spend large sums on the purchase of textbooks (or go without as many do) just to follow their courses. The open textbook movement has been around for a number of years and has been written about on LOL before<\/a>. It has real\u00a0potential\u00a0to make \u00a0university education more affordable, as well as making a valuable contribution to “public education”, but progress is slow and the number of titles available too small to make it a viable option\u00a0for most courses. A 2016 report<\/a> by Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman,\u00a0Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16<\/em>, identified a number of barriers \u00a0to academics selecting open textbooks with availability issues being the most important-<\/p>\n Interestingly concerns around quality (28%) and up-to-dateness (17%) were less frequent which suggests that there is no insuperable academic barrier to open textbook use, although high quality would be an important factor for universities wishing to provide excellent education.<\/p>\n Looking at motivating factors for university staff using open textbooks in their courses, “Cost to the student” was the highest (94%) followed by “Comprehensive content and activities” (81%) which is effectively a quality measure.<\/p>\n Early adopters and author\/creators are critical to the success of the open textbook movement and Massey staff have been involved in at least one venture. Erika Pearson of Communications, Journalism and Marketing and \u00a0Sy Taffel of English and Media Studies were involved in 2014 project \u2018texthacking\u2019 a media studies textbook for students in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific which you can read about here<\/a>. However, I haven’t been able to find any other local examples and I’m not aware if open textbooks are being used in any Massey courses, so it seems we are still a long way from achieving critical mass both locally and internationally, and at least one publisher (Flat World) has had to move from open and free to just cheap. This is a real pity because open textbooks have the potential to make a real difference.<\/p>\n A few observations on why\u00a0progress is so slow –<\/p>\n\n
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