OpenStax
Nonprofit publisher of free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks for introductory college and Advanced Placement courses, and an initiative of Rice University — itself a 501(c)(3), based at 6100 Main Street, Houston. Discovered while ingesting illowsky-introductory-statistics. Funded philanthropically; the books are free in web view and PDF, with low-cost print and iBooks editions sold alongside, and paid courseware offered next to them.
A publishing model the corpus has not held before
Every other openly licensed text here was released by its author — michael-corral and jim-hefferon posting their own books, william-trench reclaiming rights from Pearson, thomas-judson maintaining one for nearly three decades. OpenStax is the opposite arrangement: an institution that commissions, reviews, edits, revises and distributes at scale, and puts the licence on the output. The result reads like a commercial service-course textbook because it is produced like one, and the difference from a self-published open text shows in the apparatus rather than the mathematics — four practice exams, instructor answer guides behind verified accounts, PowerPoint slides, a published transition guide between editions.
Two consequences visible in the one book held here. Revisions happen “only when pedagogically necessary” and preserve problem numbering so that online homework providers can follow an edition change, which is a constraint no individual author in this corpus reports. And the licence is CC BY-NC-SA, not the CC BY the marketing implies: commercial reuse requires contacting OpenStax, and derivatives inherit the same terms. Compare mari-measurement-across-sciences, the corpus’s one unrestricted CC BY title.
Errata are handled openly — corrections are collected through the book page, reviewed by subject matter experts, and past changes published, which is closer to a maintained software project than to a print run.
Connections
- publisher of illowsky-introductory-statistics
- an initiative of Rice University
Related
illowsky-introductory-statistics · barbara-illowsky · susan-dean · springer · mathematics