Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Now this is cool...Smart Mobs reports on the OpenTextBook.org, an attempt to develop a textbook using the principles of open-source and freeware publishing.

The most interesting thing about this is that up till now, as far as I know, the move towards open-access publishing has been in the field of scholarly journals, e.g. Biomed Central. We'd been taught (as part of our class on Scholarly Publishing) that it was unlikely that monographs would be available via open-access publishing. Looks like the lecturer may have been wrong.

(So far, the textbook is about 50 pages long, mostly mathematics, which I'm not knowledgeable enough about to critique - but it looks like a great idea).

| posted by Simon at 9:01 pm